Turkey In Travail (the Birth Of A New Nation)

m

X

HAS5AK THK BASH CHAOUSH ANT) HIS ORDERLY

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The Birth of a New Nation

By

HAROLD ARMSTRONG

(Lately Assistant and Acting MUitary Attach^
to the EQgh Commissions, Coiistantinople ;

Special Service Officer in War Office and on
Head-quarts Staff of Allied Army of Occupa-
tion, and Supervisor of Turkish Gendarmerie)

WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS AND
TWO MAPS

LONDON

JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD mmW>

First pfiiliskd in 1925

MaitaalPmkiai^BrMlxfMa&TmalJiiFromiiniLodm

INTRODUCTION

P OETS and' philosophers have thought and
sung of the mutability of human affairs.
In all the coloured Romance of History
there is hardly a story so illustrative of this
mutability, so fantastic, so dramatic, as that of
Turkey during the last eight years. The Fates
allowed me to follow that story closely step by
step and often in intimate relations with its chief
actors and its chief events.

I have written herein no chronological and
exhaustive history. It is an account of personal
adventure jotted down in odd places at odd times
and often about odd events. But through them
all runs the thread of History on which they
form a strange and quaintly assorted chaplet.

• I came in close contact with the Turk in 1916,
in the hour of defeat. Germany had swept for-
ward in one tremendous drive. Austria-Hungary
was her assistant. She had torn to pieces her
enemies in the Balkans and collected the rest to
her as her allies. She had swept into Turkey

VI

INTRODUCTION

and taken control, and so across Asia Minor and
down into Mesopotamia and Bagdad. With her
assistance the Turks had hurled back the British
and inflicted on them the severe defeats of Galli-
poli and Kut-al-Amarah. On the Western front
the Allies battered in vain with useless and bloody
frontal attacks. On the Eastern front the Rus-
sians had shown their weakness, and the Caucasus
armies were in full retreat. From the Baltic,
across Central Europe through the Balkans and
Turkey to Jerusalem and Bagdad and the Cau-
casus, Germany was supreme. The overpower-
ing hand of the Black Empire held the Old World
half-strangled in its terrific grip. To many
acute neutral observers the Allies appeared to be
defeated.

In captivity I saw the dissolution of the old
Ottoman Empire. I returned to freedom to
share the stupendous victory of the Allies. I
found everywhere thrust and energy and enthu-
siasm and ideals.

The Near East, torn into strips, waited placidly
to have its future decided. A great opportunity
was given to the Allies, but they showed them-
selves incapable and unworthy of it. The Otto-
®ttan Empire, crushed and defeated, begging only
for peace and security, lay at their feet.

By folly and procrastination and by national

INTRODUCTION

vU

jealousies the Allies allowed the fruits of success
to rot. The Greeks were sent crusading into
Anatolia and were defeated and Greece was dealt
a disastrous blow.

Out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire,
through a thousand difficulties burst a Turkish
Nation. As wild and destructive as any volcano
newly in eruption, it rent its way out into the
open. It suffered the agonies of a fierce war of
self-preservation. As the Allies grew disunited
and weak, it grew strong and arrogant, until
there came the day when with a mailed fist it
threatened the peace of the World and dictated
its own terms to the impotent Powers.

In the black months of 1916 I came as a
prisoner to Constantinople. I returned to it
on the crest of the wave of victory and hope. I
crept away with the Allied Forces of Occupation
in the hour of defeat and dishonour, in the face
of a triumphant Turkish Nation, and behind
that nation the threat of a new Asia roused and
revengeful.

NOTE

The Author desires to thank the Editors of the Fortnightly
Review and the Near East for their kind permission to use
portions of his articles, which they have already published.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I First Contact with the Turks : the

Defence of Kut-al-Amaeah, 1916 . 3

n Surrender 13

III The March into Captivity ... 21

IV Captivity 30

V The Stambul Prison .... 43

VI The Prison Camp in Anatolia . . 50

VII The Fall OF THE Ottoman Empire: Release,

1918 56

VIII The First Days of the Armistice . . 60

IX Central Europe, Italy, Athens, and

Salonika in 1919 .... 66

X In Constantinople as one of the Victors . 71

XI The Greek Crusade into Anatolia and the

Awakening of the Turks ... 81

XII The Pleasant Life of Constantinople and

the Signs of Danger ... 96

XIII The Treaty of SIvres. The Storm Bursts,

1920 no

XIV The Greeks Save the Allies and Thrust

Back the Turks . . . .124

XV England in the Post-War Reaction . . 131

ix

X CONTENTS

CHAP.

XVI The Gheco-Tuekish War. The First
Greek Advance, 1921 ....

XVII Skdtasi and the Turkish Gendarmerie
XVIII Brigand Hunting : the Capture of Yanni

XIX Brigand Hunting : the Raid on Bakal ICeuy

XX As A Gendarme Supervising Officer

XXI Brigand Hunting ; the Death of Tahir the

Lazz

XXII The Greco-Tuekish War : the Summer

Offensive on Angora, 1921

XXIII A Lull between the Storms .

XXrV The Christian Minorities

XXV The End of Brigandage in the Ismidt Area

XXVI The Balkans, Central Europe, and England

IN 1922

XXVII The Greek Defeat, the Chanak Crisis, and
THE Mudania Conference, 1922 .

XXVIII Turkish Success from Mudania to the
Lausanne Conference.

XXIX The Lausanne Conference and the Recogni-

tion OF Turkey

XXX New Turkey, 1923

Index

PAGE

I4I

149

158

168

176

186

206

212

218

226

231

240

249

261

268

27 S

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Hassan the Bash-Chaoush and his Orderly . Frontispiece

TO FACE
PAGE

Turkish Village Hodjas and Coast-guard Official . 34

Head-men of Ottoman Greek villages ... 58

Gendarmerie Battalion Commander and Section Com-
manders on Castle Steps at the Mouth of the Bos-
phorus 144

Left to right : Two Gendarmes, an Armenian Village
Guard, and two Head-men of Lazz villages, in
Alemdagh Forest 160

Greek Villagers suspected of Brigandage, outside a
typical Village House 170

Brigand Band of Tahir the Lazz. Abdulla the Cha-
oush in the centre front row on Skutari Prison steps 200

Brigand Band of Zaffiri. Karaolan and Pavli hand-
cuffed. Zaffiri to their left looking bad after his
beating 230

MAPS

(I) To face page 212: illustrating the phases of the Greco-Turkish

War and the successive lines of Greek advance in the
endeavour to reach Angora.

( II ) Folding Map, at the end, of the Ottoman Empire from
Basra to Adrianople.

XI

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

B

CHAPTER I

First Contact with the Turks ; the
Defence of Kut-al-Amarah, 1916

I T was the 3r(l of December 1915, and three of us
stood leaning against a low mud-wall amongst
palm trees . W e strained our eyes staring out across
the empty desert that lay all around Kut-al-Amarah.
A mongoose, in his jerky way, came out to look at us,
and the pariah dogs growled and bit, as the fleas ran
through their long, coarse coats. Out of the distance
came the rumble and grunts of far-off guns. The
morning mists had dissolved, and the heat had begun
to shudder across the plains. Far up the bank of the
Tigris river a low cloud of dust hung heavily in the air.
The haze took strange, gigantic shapes and then formed
down into a column of waggons, guns, and men march-
ing towards us. It was the head of the Vlth Division
retreating from Bagdad.

As defence officer of the town I had much to do, but
I watched these troops with interest. There is a chill
about failure, and for the first time they were feeling
the numbing cold of defeat. They came in bedraggled,
dispirited, utterly weary after their long retreat. Here

3

4

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

and there springless, bumping mule-carts drove in vith
wounded, twisted with the agony of great, raw open
wounds. From Basra these troops had fought and
advanced invincible from victory to victory, and full of
hope and enthusiasm. They had grown even arrogant
with success, stalking through a submissive countryside,
taking great risks and justifying the taldng ; and then
on the threshold of Bagdad they had been forced to
retreat. With the mutilating Arab close at hand and
the Turks behind them they had been inspired into
the one great concentrated effort of plodding back to
Kut-al-Amarah. The driving stimulus of success was
gone. Now they came in just weary human beings,
instinctively searching for food and safety ; and in Kut
they found mud-huts and a chance to sit down and
eat and rest. They sat down and thanked God for the
chance, but they got up no more. The momentum
was gone out of the force, and out of its commander.
Like a camel in the mud this tired division slipped down
and lay firmly still.

Kut was no more than a bottle of which the broad,
deep and swift Tigris river formed the sides and the
bottom. It controlled, however, the roads into the
country beyond. Behind us lay 300 miles of unprotected
communications and half Mesopotamia conquered, but
not held. Defeat had left this one small division isolated
in the great desert. There were promises of distant
reinforcements. Determined to hold them back as far
as possible and save what had already been won, we
turned and faced the Turks.

We had not long to wait, for very soon the distant

FIRST CONTACT WITH THE TURKS 5

sandhills were black with Turks. It seemed certain
that they would attack, and there was little to prevent
them coming straight in. Our tired men were persuaded
with difficulty to dig. They scratched themselves a
few shallow pits to hide in, until they were relieved.
They knew little about trenches or their value. But
the Turks missed their chance. They settled down to
dig, and indulged in long-range artillery bombardment
of the town. They came on warily, but with a line
of trenches and a few men they effectively inserted the
cork and bottled us securely in Kut.

Hope and energy revived on good and plentiful food.
Soon the trenches grew in the hard-baked ground and
we began the underground life of trench warfare. There
was a belief that we had only to keep the Turk out
and hold our own for a few days, and then the relieving
forces would join hands witli us, and together we should
hurl back the enemy and march triumphant into Bagdad.
We prepared each day to resist and repel attacks, but
the Turk did no more than sap steadily up to our lines.
He made only two determined assaults, and he was flung
back with heavy losses.

For a while there was muddle and disorganization.
The ground was baked to tire hardness of brick, and
digging was slow. Communication trenches did not
exist, and in the drought of the late Eastern autumn
we were parched for want of water. Time and again
I watched a faithful water-carrier try to get a skinful
from the river and I saw him shot as he hurried and
stumbled over the open to his regiment. There was
little or no medical arrangement, for the medical services

6

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

were under-staffed and under-supplied. Wounded
men lay hours unattended. Food was plentiful and
freely wasted. Occasions arose when an obsei'vation
post was built of sacks of white Indian flour and shell-
holes in protecting mud-walls were filled with boxes of
jam and butter. There were 6,000 Arabs left in the
town, and unhindered they stole as they pleased. When
any man in the regiments in the fort on the right of
the line felt inclined, he dug here in the walls for butter
and there for jam and with a little flour made himself
weird pastries and threw most of them away because
his belly was full.

We had not learnt the art of building dug-outs, and
with little shelter we lived under the open sky. We
learnt the shapes of the moon and how its light might
mean attacks and death, and how its absence meant the
strain of listening and watching into the dark. We
learnt the joy of sunlight, when the strain was over.
We knew the way the stars rise and wheel across the
sky, and the light fleecy clouds that come with wind
and those that carry rain. We unlearnt the delicacy
and ignorance of those who live in houses and we became
as primitive as the Mother Earth in which we lived.
For the minute we were buoyed up with hope and the
belief in success. W^e had no serious thought for to-
morrow. This was only to be a temporary check. .

The^ new year came in with rain that chilled the
enthusiasm out of the troops. As before we had been
dried up with drought, now we slept in mud and strove
with water. The Tigris rose and came flooding down
our trenches, and both we and the enemy, who were

FIRST CONTACT WITH THE TURKS 7

now only a few yards away, were forced to evacuate
and retreat. I had one glorious half-hour, for in front
of me the Turks had to go first and we mowed them
down in bundles as they staggered away over the flooded
ground. Then we retired. We were wet to the arm-
pits. An ice-cold wind came sweeping down from the
snows on the great mountains of the Pushti-Ku. Obli-
vious of the snipers’ bullets, all night we paced to keep
alive, or huddled under ground-sheets in little holes
that we scratched in the sodden ground. Dawn came
cold and cheerless with a grey sky. An informal truce
prevailed as we dug ourselves into safety where the
ground was not water-logged. Many of the Indians
were frozen stiff ; and for myself my hands had swollen
up like great potatoes, and the scratches and scars stood
out on them black and beastly like eyes in potatoes.
The sun I We prayed for the sun. Like a grey inverted
bowl the clouds slowly swung back, and the sun came
out, and then as we felt its first joy of warmth the clouds
swung back again grey and dreary as before.

The enemy had gone back a thousand yards, and
between us there was a sea of water. The danger of
attack was over. The hope of success was dying. The
long siege settled down to its dull, grey monotony. It
became as eventless as a schoolboy’s diary. There was
no. rest, no going back to comfortable billets as in France,
but always the crack and flip of snipers’ bullets and
the drone of shells. The hospital gave no protection
to the wounded, for it was bombed and fired on. It
was no more than an Arab house, with staff offices and
gun emplacements on all sides of it.

8

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

I lay there in terror when ill, for the enemy’s shells
burst just over or just short of it all day, and the enemy’s
aeroplanes dropped bombs close by, and bullets came
with a thud into its mud-walls. From a window I
could see down a bullet-swept street. One day an .Arab
woman sauntered by with a child and a bullet killed it
while it slept in her arms. She made no sign that she
understood, but nursed it the livelong day. Sometimes
she put down the little limp body in a doorway and
called to it and mocked it and enticed it to come and
play ; and then she would croon over it and hum it a
sleeping song of her people. That day she played with
it, and that night beneath my window she hummed her
tuneless cradle song, till I heard her cry tliat her child
was dead and the noise of her tearing her hair and clothes
as she called on her God, while a man persuaded her
to come into safety. It took me back suddenly to the
mountains and the pines above Simla, when I had seen
a mam-monkey drop her child out of a tree and play
with it like the Arab woman and croon over it and
lay it down and call to it all a summer’s day, and then
when the tribe came near she had caught up the limp
body and raced chattering and crying along the tree-tops.

As time passed our hope began to die. Uncertainty
sapped the strength of loyalty and discipline. Food
began to become scarce and communiques from General
Head Quarters increased in number and in promises,
till the troops laughed at each new one.

So we came to the month of March. Already the
grass was growing and coming, rich and fresh and green,
above the parapets, and here and there was a clump

FIRST CONTACT WITH THE TURKS 9

of flowers. Food had grown scarcer and scarcer, till
we were down to starvation rations. Hopes were fed
on the continuous grunts of the guns of the relieving
force far down stream and the crazy old aeroplanes
that at times flew over. Starved men look out on a
grey world, and monotony and uncertainty breed des-
pair. Now and again, when relief appeared to be near,
there would be a tiring burst of excitement. Hope
would flare up and then die down again wearily into
the old monotony.

The men had grown terribly weak. They had begun
to lose heart and desertions and courts-martial were
frequent. The ratio of all things had changed. Money
was of little value. A sack of silver rupees dropped
by an aeroplane excited interest only because it had,
with poetic justice, fallen on and killed a Supply and
Transport sergeant and conductor. The discipline of
the Army Act was gone, and stick and fist took its pla'ce ;
for what did a man care for court-martial and fourteen
years’ hard labour when his belly was empty and he
had only his moustache to chew on, and when men fell
down exhausted under the weight of a rifle and too
rounds of ammunition. Morning after mornmg a firing
squad shot a prisoner behind the fort wall at dawn.
Crimes took on a new aspect. Murder was far less
than the theft of food. T'here was one poor devil who
had eaten his piece of dark barley bread and refused,
because he was a Dogra-Brahmin, to eat the horse-
meat that completed his rations, and then he stole and
was hand-cuffed and shut into the guard-room. While
the guard slept — and now all the guards slept— -he

10

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

crawled to the sack of dirty flour that held a week’s
rations for his company and, gnawing a way through,
sucked out a pound of flour, and his choking, as the
dry flour throttled him, woke the guard.

Then there came upon us some of the plagues of
Egypt. With each shower of rain came myriads of frogs,
that croaked and hopped till they fell by thousands
into the trenches. There, trapped, they sat in multi-
tudes and popped as men trod on them or died of thirst
when the sun came out. They lay and rotted, till the
stench of dead frogs grew more sickly to empty stomachs
than rotting barley or dead corpses of men. Before us
in the barbed wire were the bodies of many dead Turks
mummified by the desert air. With the spring, the
mummies died, and the world became full of great evil
blue flies that frequent butchers’ shops.

Lice came by the million and crawled in indecency.
Dysentery and scurvy and enteritis, which is little less
than cholera, killed the men. Despair and monotony
and hunger got hold of us. There was disease, starva-
tion, desertion, crime, despair, and over all the drone of
the 40 lb. shells and the crack of the snipers’ bullets.

Confined as we were in so small an area, nothing
could be kept secret or quiet. Mistalces made were
glaringly obvious, and the troops became querulous and
critical. They criticized the lack of precautions taken
to protect the food supply, and the presence of the large
thieving Arab population who had to be fed at their
expense. They pointed out that in all this siege no
attempt to break out had been made, nor had any help
been given to the relieving force. They criticized the

FIRST CONTACT WITH THE TURKS ii

Supply Services and the continuous altering of the date
up to which we could last, which had driven the reliev-
ing force to expend its strength in bits and gave it no
time to concentrate for one big blow. The British
soldier, in his own grousing grumpy way, stood the
strain magnificently. The Indian officer and the sepoy
lost heart more quickly.

But I would not include all in this sweeping statement.
By tlie grace of God and the aid of a scamp of a British
private, I found buried in tire fort wall one of the tins
of crude sugar which had been used as a rivetment in
a shell-hole early in the siege. The sugar was sweet and
strong and worth its weight twice over in pure gold.
I placed it in the hands of Ali Khan, the Mess Havildar,
Now Ali IChan had many faults. He was a dull Pun-
jabi Mussulman, long and thin and angular with a
tendency to argue and avoid obeying orders. Each day
I doled out half an ounce of precious sugar to each
officer. Each day I weighed the tin and its contents,
where it was kept in the Havildar’s dug-out. Ali Khan
was starving and he could hardly move for the great
weariness that starvation brings. The Genoese cook,
whose fat hung on him now in loose folds, and others
who knew what was in that tin, watched it with hungry
eyes and tempted Ali Khan, but during six long dreary
weeks he sat guard over it and saw that not one ounce
went astray. One night, after the sugar was long since
finished, Ali Khan was sent to handle some bombs.
The bombs blew up and all that was left of Ali Khan
vras strips of flesh on the sides of a trench. May God
collect his scattered remnants and let him into Paradise !

12

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The end grew near. The spring was coming clean
and fresh with the undefmable kick of new life in the
air. Far up in the Persian hills the snow was melting
and the river had risen into a gigantic flood that covered
the land and cut off all hope of relief. The duck came
fleeting over us on their way to the breeding grounds.
The linnets flirted and played across tine trenches as
they paired. A snake or two rustled through the grass
above our heads, and the parapets of the trenches were
carpeted thick with luscious grasses and scented flowers.
But down in the trenches it was dark, weary monotony.
I could smell those trenches, stale, full of disease and
death and dirt and foulness and despair and tired, starved
men who cared little for life or death. I could feel, almost
touch. Spring. The songs of the birds and the hum of
insects and the great swollen river spoke of surging life,
but down in the earth we were imprisoned underground.
We were already half buried, while life surged over us.

I slept lightly as one hungry, and Subedar Rahmet
Ali called me softly to come and see. In the rose flush
before dawn a sickle moon was sliding down the sky.
Almost within its horns glowed a great bright star. I
could hear my Punjabi Mussulmans whispering together,
“ The Star and Crescent of the Prophet.” From the
Turkish trenches opposite a Mullah called loud and
clear the Morning Call to Prayer. Subedar Rahmet Ali
was praying ; and suddenly, as a stranger, as one shut
out, as one lost in the vastness of Asia, I felt lonely.
Months later I met Rahmet Ali in prison, suffering
because he would not do homage to the Sultan of Turkey,
and I was glad and comforted.

CHAPTER II

Surrender

I T was late April, and at last the end had come. The
morning of the 29th dawned dull and hot and
still. I was away before dawn in the palm-groves
destroying regimental records, and burning rifles and
ammunition in the dug-outs there. The air was full
of futile pops and loud explosions. With a loud dron-
ing whirr, half a breech-block from a burst gun sailed
over, wiped away the head of one of a number of Arabs
who sat watching us, and buried itself in a pile of tents.
The rest of the Arabs, still eyeing us like scavenger
dogs, moved rapidly away. As they passed, one picked
up a rifle from a pile and made off. I made after him.
The cur snarled back at me and threatened me, and
his friends closed in evilly on me from each side. I
was working in my shirt-sleeves and was unarmed. I
could see murder in their cruel eyes. Snatching up an
axe that lay close by I made at the man, and the steel
bit into his skull as into a pine log. The snarl went
out of the faces of his companions. They salaamed
respectfully and disappeared.

We had almost completed our work when I saw
that the Arab population was streaming out of the

13

H

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

town. I stepped out of the palm-groves to look and
there over the open, where for many months no one
had dared to walk, came small bodies of men. They
were the Turks.

I was disappointed. They were dirty, unshaved,
ill-dressed, ragged rapscallions of men. I was piqued
that we should have surrendered to so tatterdemalion
a crew. I had not yet realized that it is only the British
soldier who loses his military efficiency when he is
dirty.

They came in methodically, taking up posts from
where they commanded all entrances and exits. The
Arabs were shouting with delight, leaping and salaaming
and offering them food. They had not starved, these
Arabs, by the look of them, and they were offering
fresh mutton and white bread free as gifts of peace.
The Turks were but little impressed. When they
got in the way they drove them on one side. They
had had many proofs of their loyalty before. I could
have thanked a mounted officer who kicked full in the
mouth an Arab who tried to kiss his boot. It was ever
so with these Arabs ; they sung songs to and cringed
before the victors and mutilated the wounded of the
defeated.

I fell in my men and moved off to our rendezvous.
Then I realized that we were prisoners, for we were
roughly halted by dirty fellows and searched and dis-
armed. At every few yards we had to stop and beg
leave to advance from apathetic and supercilious young
officers. My whole spirit revolted, for I had never
learnt to cringe.

SURRENDER

IS

We concentrated in the palm-groves by the river-
bank. There we spent a night of terror. For the first
time for many years I was defenceless and unarmed.
We had eaten no food at all that day, and the heart sinks
when the belly is empty. A low thick fog lay over
everything, and out of it now and again loomed groups
of men on horses, uncanny and terrible, because they
were unknown and spoke in a strange tongue. We
set sentries with sticks, who would have been useless
in real danger, but it seemed better to be wakened than
to be murdered in our sleep.

At last that long night came to an end, and in the
dawn I dropped asleep, to be wakened by the sound of
a scuffie. A short sturdy Turk was endeavouring to
tear his water-bottle away from a huge Sikh. The sepoy
looked to me for protection. Suddenly I realized that
I was helpless ; and I was ashamed. A little way off
sat a Turkish officer on the side of a water-wheel. I
ran to him and called his attention in French, which
by the grace of God he more or less understood. He
called to his Turk to leave the water-bottle alone. He
strode up to the man and beat him on the face. But
the fellow obstinately carried on. The officer’s hand
flew to his belt, but his revolver was not there. Seeing
a pickaxe lying near he caught it up and drove the point
through the man.

Towards late afternoon we filed out of Kut. The
Turks had told us that if we got to Shamran, some
eight miles away, we should find food. The Turkish
commander KLhalil Pasha and his Staff, with the German
officers on it, watched us march out in fours. Right

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

i6

under his eyes Turkish soldiers looted our men, and
when I called to him and told him, he shrugged his
shoulders and said something to his Germans, and
they all laughed together.

That night was a veritable nightmare. We marched
in by brigades and regiments of an unarmed army.
We arrived in the dark. Our food was a great pile of
dry biscuits. They were being issued by a staff-sergeant
with the aid of a candle that flickered in the soft night
air. Outside the ring of light moved a swaying mass
of men. They had starved for two months, and had
eaten nothing for thirty-six hours. Now and again
they would surge in like wolves snatching at the bis-
cuits, and every officer and sergeant in the ring would
strike and kick and force them back out to the edge of
the poor light. The biscuits were hard and dried
and no more than coarse compressed porridge that
should have been boiled. Eaten hard they swelled
in the stomachs, contracted with long fasting, and so
killed the men in agony. It was a sorry, pitiful dance
of death, to fight for a rough hard biscuit, to munch
it and die as if poisoned : a dance of death round a
few candles that flickered in the night air.

For m3^elf, I nibbled my biscuit and, worn out,
dropped asleep on the ground and woke in the sun
to see them carrying those who had died in the night,
away to shallow pits in the long grass by the river bank.

We rested a day or two, and from down-stream came
a British hospital ship loaded with rich food. It landed
its cases and then steamed away again. For three days
I fed on plum-pudding and champagne cider and mixed

SURRENDER

17

them with rich tinned foods and then bathed in the
river and lazed in the sun. But the rich food killed
many men with weaker stomachs, and the rough hospital
was full of sick. On three sides of us the Turkish
pickets made three rings and on the fourth there was
the river in flood. I pondered the chances of escape.
To pass the guards and swim the river would be difficult,
and beyond that were the miles of desert with the evil
mutilating Arab. In despair I put the idea aside.

At last our turn to go up to Bagdad had come. Officers
and men were separated. They were our men and
they were being taken away to be ill-used and starved
and beaten and forced to work in such conditions that
few of them were to win out alive to the Peace. Helpless
as children, they crowded to the river bank while we
embarked. They cried to us good-bye, so that when
we were far out of sight we could still hear their calls.

There was little room on the ships, but the Turkish
officers on board tried to make us comfortable. They
told us of all the delights of Bagdad and made us lavish
promises of the life we were to lead with hotels and
theatres and dances and beautiful women and many
things that had become vague and distant. It is a
curious trait among the Turks to tell these quiet effective
lies, which are of no use to anyone, but calculated to
please the listener. We had not yet learned that they
handled words, as it were, like coloured threads, to be
woven into what pattern their imagination suggested,
but without reference to facts or realities. They were
polite, these Turkish officers, and I felt that they looked
on us English much as we look on Americans and Aus-

c

i8 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

tralians, as a people full of bustle and money and new
ideas, but virile and rough and without manners.

As we passed villages, the Arabs came racing out
hallooing and howling and indicating with lewd gestures
the foul mutilations they would perpetrate. They had
greeted the Vlth Division, as it advanced, as their
saviours. The Turkish officers aboard looked at them
with dislike and spat over the side of the ship. We
had seen the Turkish wounded brought in mutilated
as we advanced. Call it what you will, “ Mesopotamia,”
“ Irak,” “ the cradle of civilization,” it is no more than
an empty, dusty, barren desert with two great rivers
ribbed with strips of green fields and with marshes.
It is an evil land full of the plagues of Egypt, and scattered
over it are a treacherous, dirty, despicable, evil people.
Here and there it is believed that oil lies hidden, and
so men and money are squandered on it. Long after-
wards, when the peace came, the British Government
sent men full of ideals to form a stable good government
in Irak. They worked hard, but met with revolt and
hatred. They never realized that the Arabs wanted
no good stable government, and that they will stand
no control.

On the second day we landed at Bagdad, and our
Turkish officers departed and took with them all their
glowing promises. We were formed into a column and
marched slowly through the principal streets. On
each side from roadway to roof-tops were banked masses
of people who watched us in dead silence. The Turks
had given orders for silence, and so well do they under-
stand how to enforce their orders that, surrounded

SURRENDER

19

by this vast crowd, I could hear the pad of our own
feet in the thick dust and, as we passed under the great
gateway, the sound of a stork who sat perched on her
ponderous nest on a broken minaret and cracked with
her beak in disapproval. Bagdad was no more than the
ordinary Mesopotamian village enlarged, with its twist-
ing, dirty alleys of streets and its dark covered bazaars
full of tiny open shops.

For a while we lodged in the long cavalry barracks
that were foul from the remains of successive regiments
of Turks. Already the stale smell of the coming summer
was in the air and we were glad to get orders to board
the train that starts on the road to Constantinople.
There were ninety miles of solid railway built with
all the German strength and forethought and precision.
It showed the ambition of Germany, and under the
heavy hand of her dictatorship this land might have
blossomed like a rose. But the Germans had started
building the end of the renowned railway from Berlin
to Bagdad before they had finished the middle. So
we alighted at the seedy village of Samarra, and there
close by the station we slept in cattle pens, into which
at night they drove oxen. The Turks tried, almost
pathetically, to treat us well. They allowed us to
transport great bundles of our kit as far as here. But
their- standards of life and their ways and ours were
different, and they soon gave up the attempt.

Everywhere where man had enclosed a bit of land, the
dirt of Samarra was thick and foul, but in the open the
scavengers of nature cleaned all with care. It was the
kingdom of beetles. I never believed that so many

20

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

existed. From every quarter they came hurrying in,
rolling the filth of men and animals into neat balls and
racing away on the wind with them. Jackals, hawks,
dogs, ants and beetles and the eating sun cleaned up
the refuse, while man did nothing but befoul : except
perhaps when, over-troubled and irritated, an Arab
might put his shirt on an ants’ nest and so delouse it.

Our energy and courage were coming back and with
them came the spirit of lawlessness, which is a prisoner’s
privilege — ^the fierce resentment against all and every
order. The Turks had given up the make-believe of
treating us well. We had to conform to the conditions
of the country. When ordered to set out on the march,
we obstinately refused. We demanded to be allowed to
transport all our kit, and it would have taken a regiment
of horses to have done this, We argued and resisted
and refused to move until, towards late evening, the
Turkish commandant, in despair, brought us more
pack animals and then we agreed to move off.

The sun was already low, and out of the sunset came
racing a great black cloud of dust and rain that whistled
and tore at the world and filled the air with darkness.
In the village stood the Mosque of Omar with its dome
which had been covered with plates of brass by a pious
Persian Shah. We stood in raging darkness. The
sun was hidden, but it struck through the storm' and
the great bronze dome of the Mosque glowed close
above us like a red-hot inverted bowl, in the wild dark-
ness. Then, wet through, we trudged away into the
night and the unknown.

CHAPTER III

The March into Captivity

O F that march I cannot mite a pleasant history
with neat notes on historical places and pictures
of scenery and of men. We travelled the
length of upper Mesopotamia into Kurdistan, past a
hundred cities of renown, across the breadth of Cilicia,
and then far up into Anatolia till we came to Kustamouni
below the Black Sea. In all we travelled perhaps some
1, 600 miles. I can give no consecutive account of times
and places. With a halt here and there and a day’s
rest now and again, we trudged solidly mile after mile
until we became as the animals. For myself the great
facts of life were hunger and thirst and an aching desire
to rest. I had no clear thinking, but only a dull instinct
that I must go on, and that ahead there was water and
food and sleep. The training of the public schools, the
veneer and polish of modern life and civilization dis-
appeared, and we were primitive in our dealings one
with another. Like an animal I trudged forward,
eating when I could find food, drinking water
foul or clear, tired but with an insistent subcon-
scious instinct of fear that if I stopped I should
fall into the hands of the mutilating Arab. Here and

22

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

there incidents stood out vividly and remained clear.

We halted for the first long halt at the village of
Tekreet. There, as we entered the gates, the Arabs spat
on us and stoned us, until we reached a stretch of sandy
beach on the river’s edge. Above us were tall cliffs and
on the top a line of open cafds, in which the whole
population sat the live-long day and jabbered and called
to. each other.

On that beach we found a few of our soldiers who had
been captured earlier. They were dying of dysentery ;
and there they lay uncared for and untended on the naked
sand under the pitiless June sun. When we helped
them to crawl into the shade under the cliffs the Arabs
stoned them out again into the sun. Later we heard
that our men came here by the hundreds, until this
beach was black with men crawling because they could
not stand. Under the raging July sun they died of
dysentery and enteritis, while the Arabs gloated over
them and looted them, and the Turks sat stolidly by,
giving no help because they had no help to give.

We were ahead, but behind us came our men, and all
that long desert road was strewn with their bodies where
they fellj some murdered, some too wealc to walk, some
killed by disease ; and the jackals and the crows fed on
them after the Arabs had finished their bestialities and
looted their bodies.

Sometimes we passed battalions of Turkish troops
marching down to Bagdad. Often they marched on the
“ go as you please ” system, by which they formed up
in some town such as Aleppo. There a ration would be
dealt out to each man and orders given to make for

THE MARCH INTO CAPTIVITY

23

Bagdad, some 300 miles away. The first few files would
stick together, and then the regiment would string out
into small parties, and finally into single men limping
along.

These the Arabs watched, and when occasion served,
they killed and looted them, so that we passed many
corpses of Turkish soldiers on the route. They lay
by the roadside with their throats cut, left to rot like
carrion for all their officers or their Government cared ;
while far away in Anatolia the women waited eagerly,
but in vain, for news of their men. Underfed, misused,
paid but little and that rarely, ragged and dirty, these
Turkish troops were as wretched in their liberty as we
were in our captivity.

Their animals suffered equally. We halted one night
close by the bivouac of a cavalry regiment. In the grey
light before dawn I was awaked by heavy breathing and
felt warm breath on my cheek. Up against the sky over
me stood a great horse gaunt and monstrous with under-
feeding and neglect. He was an English cavalry charger.
He cropped a little at the dry desert grass. Then he
nosed with his wet muzzle and blew as he scented British
blood and the British smell in the men sleeping round
me and he whinnied and neighed with delight. And
there he stayed contentedly until a rough evil Turkish
trooper with the face of a Tartar came and took him
away. But as he went the old horse looked back and
called to us again, as fellow-prisoners.

While we followed the Tigris river there was plenty,
and water to drink and chances to bathe. We learnt to
love it dearly and dreaded to leave it. We had gone up

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

24

past the village of Hammam Ali where there are sulphur
and petrol springs in which the rich sick come to bathe ;
and then we swung into the desert and clambered up a
rough track over low stone hills. The only water was
from a pool or two rank with sulphur which gave no
relief, but left the mouth foul as after fever. We trudged
all day and with but little rest throughout the night,
because water was far ahead. Towards midnight the
plain in front became alive with red lights, and when
we came near we saw that it was a prairie fire. Our
road ran through it, and we marched with the
grass crackling and blazing close on each side of us.
When morning came we were still trudging forward
with blackened faces and eyes sore with smoke ; and
the fierce sun came up to dry out of us the little moisture
left by the fire. I was parched and prayed to see the
kindly Tigris river again.

Close beside me with his shoulders forward as if he
carried a weight staggered a colonel. His face was
ashen grey and white with weariness and his eyes blood-
shot and unseeing. A huge Scotsman, a captain in an
Indian regiment, swung up to him, picked him up like
a child, brushed aside the driver who disagreed, and
sat him among the kit on a pack-pony. And there
with wide-open, unseeing eyes he sat, while the Scots-
man strode behind to watch that the Arab did not throw
him off.

The plain turned to rolling hills and they called to
us that water was near. Our guards rode lazily on
sturdy stallions, and, knowing the route, they had tied
long skins of water under their ponies’ girths. Still the

THE MARCH INTO CAPTIVITY

25

unending dusty road wound away into the distance.
Once I stepped on one side to avoid a hole and I trod
on a snake. He was gorged and a lump showed that
he was newly fed. A foot away was a sand-grouse’s
nest full of eggs. Eagerly, witli eyes watching that no
one took them away from me, I ate the eggs hurriedly.
They were set and about to hatch, but in my life I have
tasted nothing so sweet as the raw wet meat in those
eggs.

At last we reached the low range of hills that lies
above Mosul, and as we came down the slope in the
dawn, the city lay below us. A soft mist from the river
gave the picture beauty. The minarets and the mosques
shone golden in the sun. Beyond it lay the ruins of
Nineveh. It was pleasant to come down into its dark,
shaded, twisting streets. We were back in the age of
the great Khalifs. The mysteries of the Arabian Nights
were there, and the Street of the Rope-Makers and the
Hunchback and the latticed windows with their promise
of black-eyed veiled women watching. We were in
another age, so that when we came to the cavalry
barracks in the great square we found one of our inter-
preters had preceded us, for he was hung in chains over
the main gate, as a warning.

We lodged foully in those barracks where vermin and
filth were plentiful. The open country was better, and
we were glad once more to move off.

We left the Tigris behind us with many deep regrets,
for in all this hard, cruel land it alone had shown itself
kind. We went westwards through parched open
p lains till we came to the village of Nisibin, and in

26

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

this oasis we rested. It is a village of Jews, and full of
gardens and trees. We bought eggs and fresh milk and
slept in a green meadow beside a stream, where the fish
came catching flies and it was good to bathe. The
green came pleasant to the eyes, tired with staring under
the sun out over bumt-up plains.

Beyond Nisibin lay the same great plain. In times of
peace it should have been full of corn and barley, for this
is a rich land, but the Turks had massacred the Armenians.
As far as the eye could see stood corn uncut and untended,
shrivelling in the sun. We passed ruined villages where
the wells were full of bodies and where bodies lay in
the torn and burnt houses. On every side there was
desolation and ruin and the population driven away or
murdered. Being thirsty, I ran to get a drink from a
spring that bubbled and laughed its way out of a cave
beneath two trees. The water came out foul, for tlxe
cave was full of dead bodies.

On the whole I wasbeast-likeand unmoved, but occasion-
ally some incident would rouse me. In the plain beyond
Nisibin we met a body of Turkish gendarmes, who
stopped for a while to talk to our guards and then pushed
on again. One of them carried a whip and as he swung
into his saddle he flicked a woman who sat resting and
drove her into a trot before him. My blood boiled
with impotent rage. They were selling these Armenian
women for a few shillings in the bazaars of Aleppo and
Mosul.

We had not gone many miles before the British orderlies
came to me, because I knew the language. White with
anger, they told me how that a mile back they had found

THE MARCH INTO CAPTIVITY

27

a British soldier lying near the road almost dead of
dysentery and that one of our guards, who was an Arab,
had put sand into the sick man’s mouth and so murdered
him. I too was angry, and I spoke with the Arab and
cursed him fiercely, and he was surprised and even
indignant.

“ What ! ” he said, “ that man would have died this
night and the jackals would have been at his feet while
he was yet alive ! ” He was doing a kindness in his
own way, and so far apart were our ways of thought that
there was no means of bridging the gulf.

When there was water handy we halted and slept
beside it. After one such halt, as we moved off, we
found that a new body of men had joined us. They
were sepoys and Indian followers. They were starved
and nearly naked. One had no more than a puttee, and
this he had wound round his loins. His ribs stood out
as in a famine. We examined them carefully, and one
by one we recognized them as deserters. Our guards
cursed them. Our men would have nothing to do
with them. They would give them no food nor money.
After a meal they cleaned up every crumb, so that even
an ant might not find a piece of food. They drove them
back behind us, and so one by one the deserters fell
out and in the open desert paid their penalty.

At Ras-al-Ain we met the head of the railway as it
crept, like some great caterpillar, slowly down across
Asia towards Bagdad, the railway that was to be the
key to the East. We followed its track across the
Euphrates and so down into the great city of Aleppo.

We were lodged in little hotels that were hardly less

28

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

foul than the cavalry barracks of Bagdad, and they
were far more cramped, for we were not allowed out.
When the time came to settle our accounts, we were
warned that if we did not pay we should be forced to
stay there until we did. The stale stench of those
hotels was sufficient. We paid gladly to get once more
out on to the open road. We travelled by train to the
foot of the Amanus Mountains and climbed over them
on foot. We marched in a pitch-dark night, and I
found myself soon far ahead of the column. Behind
me came the beat of a powerful motor-car on low gear.
In the car was a German officer and a woman. As I
stepped into the ditch to give it room the headlights
showed that there was a body lying close beside me.
I came to it warily and struck a match and shaded the
flame to look. It was the body of a woman. I drew
back, thinking it must be some quick disease such as
the plague, and then I saw that in her arms was a child
with its head beaten in, and that the woman had been
dragged some yards along the road. Up all that steep
road there were bodies of men, women and children in
the ditches, some had just fallen, worn out, and some
had been killed.

We crossed the mountains and came down to a field
set with mulberry groves, where we slept, and when I
woke I heard the sound of women and children, and in
the next field were a crowd of Armenians and with them
white-bearded priests. I saw them marched away over
the country under the escort of armed gendarmes.
They were being marched slowly to death, and the
bodies I had seen by the roadside in the Amanus

THE MARCH INTO CAPTIVITY

29

Mountains were those of them who could not keep
up.

The train carried us to Tarsus, and far out we could
see the sea and on the horizon smoke that they told us
was that of a British battleship. We were raced over
the Taurus Mountains by Germans in motor-lorries and
entrained at Bozanti. We travelled by train across
Anatolia to the junction of Eski-Shehir. Packed tight
into carriages we were unable to sleep. Never before
had I realized that the lack of sleep could hurt as vividly
as a blow. We came at last to the town of Angora, far
back in the Anatolian plateau, and from there, with our
belongings in country carts, we marched through the
wild mountains of the country, through pine forests
and through little villages in long green valleys set
between bare hills, and so by this steep mountain road
we came at last to Kustamouni, which lies close beside
the Black Sea.

CHAPTER IV

Captivity

K USTAMOUNI was a typical town such as may
be seen all over Anatolia. Our road ran
between scattered broken-down houses and
little gardens buttressed up with loose stone walls, up
a narrow valley beside a shallow rapid stream. On each
side of us were steep hills of rock, scarred and twisted
and barren. At the head of the valley on a steep cliff
frowned a stone castle, and round it was grouped, as if
for safety, the main portion of the town. Below the
castle I looked back, and beyond the narrow valley I
could see that the country widened to a broad plain
full of com and grass. Round the plain were steep
hills that rose into mountains and stretched peak after
peak far away into the distance. Wherever I went
in Anatolia I saw that view in replica.

We were lodged near by the castle in a large Greek
school. The floors were of well-planed wood on which
we should have walked in stockinged feet, and our
heavy boots soon tore them into splinters.

Utterly tired as we were, it came as a relief, as a sigh
of pleasure, to sit down on a chair in a room that shut
out the open insistent world. It was strange and pleasant

30

CAPTIVITY

3 *

to put one’s knees under a table and eat with knife and
fork.

But I had long dreaded the moment that we should
stop travelling, for I had realized the strain and reaction
of inactivity. I was fit and hard, and as the days passed,
my body clamoured for the physical activity to which it
had become accustomed. We were not allowed out. It
became terrible to be shut away from the sun and the air
and the open night sky full of stars. My body, as
it were, crept with energy revolting against restraint
and confinement. I paced up and down like a wild
animal unable to keep still.

Gradually we settled down into the monotony of a
prisoner’s life in which the day’s work is the getting
through it. Our guards were quaint old reservists,
dressed in shabby blue uniforms that had shrunk ridicu-
lously up their arms and legs. They wore for their
equipment a belt with a cartouche box and carried old
rifles that were more noisy than dangerous. These
were given to them on the policy that they were sufficient
to sound the alarm but useless to us, if we made a dash
for liberty.

The guards were terribly afraid of us when we first
arrived. We were, I think, to them something strange,
half wild animals and half superior beings which might
do something unusual, but which they had at all costs
to keep safe. They could never have prevented our
breaking out, but ffieir gims would have alarmed the
countryside which was full of soldiers, armed police
and gendarmes. The sergeant in charge was a little
fellow of fifty, whom we nicknamed “ Puck.” On the

32

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

first day I looked out of a window from the third story
of the house. All round were steep cliffs. Puck caught
sight of me. With a wild grimace he blew his whistle,
summoned his men to his aid and levelled his rifle pre-
pared to fire. For some minutes they watched me
suspiciously, and then, satisfied that I could not fly, they
went back to the guard-room to smoke.

Here, as always during these years of captivity, we
held a moral superiority over the Turk. He was always
trying to win our approval, always explaining his actions
to us, and he showed us a deference, mixed with ill-
treatment, that made a curious blend. He would try
to treat us up to our standards of living, and then he
would grow tired of it and let things conform to the
poor conditions of his own country.

I became terribly ill with an internal trouble and, as
dengue fever which knotted all my joints came too, the
doctors decided to send me for exchange. On a Novem-
ber morning I was hoisted into a country cart and,
with an escort and accompanied by a Turkish officer
of the old-fashioned type, a certain Sherif Bey, I set
out for Constantinople. We followed the same road as
that by which we had marched up. We trekked across
the mountain plateau and over high passes from where
we looked down over miles of forests of pines that sighed
together like a great sea.

The movement and the air revived me and I began
rapidly to grow well. Seeing the hopes of exchange
disappearing, I strove to remain sick. It was bitterly
cold. The wind blew from the north straight off the
Black Sea and the frozen Crimea. We came one early

CAPTIVITY

33

morning to the head of a pass. A fog covered everything,
and so intense was the cold that the fog froze on the
trees, and even under my blankets in my cart I was
chilled. The cart stopped and I looked out to see what
was the matter. On the road were a number of dogs
and donkeys and, among them, unconcerned, without
any other covering but their ordinary clothes, lay asleep
their Turkish drivers. Shouted at, they woke up, shook
themselves, and urged their animals to get up and clear
the road. They saluted my Turkish officer respectfully
as we passed. I was amazed at the hardihood of the
Turkish peasants. At Bagdad and on the march up
I had seen our guards lie down on stone floors, not
troubling to loosen their coats or shift their bandoliers
of ammunition, and there with a butt of a rifle or an
arm as a pillow, they slept as if in a feather bed.

The guards, the cart drivers, a number of travellers
who had joined us for fear of the brigands that filled
the mountains, Sherif Bey and I lived all close together.
At night we stopped at some house and in the wide
hearth piled up wood and dried dung and made a great
blaze, and drank tea and ate what the householder gave
us free of charge. There is a curious state of democracy
among the Turks. They respect the man not at all,
but they respect his ofiice. The head-man of the vil-
lage, elected yearly by the males, had appointed our
lodging, and he would come to feed with us. One by
one all the men of the village would come, slipping off
their shoes at the door and making the' triple salaam
as they advanced across the room. They behaved
with dignity and with none of that nervous arrogance

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

34

of our Northern democrats, who distrust their ability
to hold their own and are for ever expecting to be lightly
treated. These Turks would wait till asked to sit down,
and then they would talk openly and freely, criticizing
the greatest to their faces in courteous but forceful
terms. Using the correct titles of “ Pasha ” or “ Bey ”
or “ Effendi ” for each, they spoke none the less as
man to man and as equals, except that they respected
the old, and when a man might spe^ quoting the authority
of his office they paid him due deference.

Here, away in Anatolia, far from the railway and
the sea, I was getting a last glimpse of the Ottoman
Turk as he had been and as he had come down from
the days of his greatness. The great Turkish Empire
of the sixteenth century had sagged to its fall and been
buttressed here and there. It had been saved sometimes
by the ability of a Grand Vizier, sometimes by sudden
bursts of vitality and the quarrels of its neighbours.
Now it was disappearing by reason of decay. The
villages through which we passed were empty of young
men, and where there were Christians they were dis-
loyal and, if the chance occurred, whispered treason to
me. There was a sense of deadness. They were
simple, sturdy folk, these Turkish peasants. They
made no pretence of wishing to fight in this war. I
saw none of the wild enthusiasm of other countries,
except among the recruits we met singing along the roads,
but they were young and excited. For the rest, the
country and the people were tired of the everlasting
wars, and ever and again they cursed Enver Pasha
and his German crew.

CAPTIVITY

35

They were a kindly, hospitable people, slowly roused
and then capable of terrible anger and tremendous
energy. They were the last of the aristocrats, with
their vices and their virtues. They ruled as by Divine
Right, as part of a caste, and without political theories.
They were not vicious or cruel, but they did not under-
stand pain in others. They had a profound contempt
for the rest of mankind, and inherent laziness covered
by great courtesy. Inefficient to distraction, they were
eminently lovable. Their sense of humour was simple.
Sleeping round the hot embers of the fire I was night
after night awaked by the hideous snores of a carter,
who had a face like a frog and slept with his mouth
wide open. At last in desperation I begged some one
to wake up Balik Pasha ^ or the “ Fish Pasha ^ and shut
his fly-trap of a mouth. The name stuck. For a
week the word “ Balik roused a roar of laughter.
Some one on the march would call for Balik Pasha
with the fly-trap mouth,’* and from end to end of the
caravan, drivers and guards and passengers in the carts
would shout with laughter and call one to another.
People used to wake the little fellow at all times to tell
him his nickname and then roar with applause, in which
he would join. They would, as is their custom, get up
at one or two in the morning, kick the fire into life and
light cigarettes, and then one would call “ Balik Pasha ”
and the whole room would rock with laughter till they
lay down to sleep again. Long afterwards a general
came to inspect the troops in the area. He heard men
talk of Balik Pasha,” and incautiously asked who he
was. So they brought the little carter before the general,

36 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

and a whole countryside laughed and the story became a
legend.

At last we came again to Angora, which had become
terrible, for half the town was newly burnt and the
refugees camped where they could. The market-place
was full of triangles on which hung the bodies of many
brigands and deserters ; for all the country was dis-
organized and discontented, and robbers had made every
road unsafe.

We travelled by the same railway route as that up
which I had come. But this time there was ample
room, for Sherif Bey requisitioned a coupe for me, and
this he filled up with flour. This he sold at a good
profit in Constantinople ; for the Grand Vizier had
made a corner in wheat and so the people paid a big
price for their flour. Sherif Bey was a genial good
soul, and at every station acquaintances came into the
train to see him and squatted down cross-legged on the
flour and drank black coffee. After gongs had been
sounded and whistles blown and a polite guard had
asked the gentlemen to get oflF, they left, still calling
good-bye, and then came back again with some last
message, and so we dawdled in this kindly, lazy fashion
across Anatolia. There was little organization, and none
of the drive and concentration that the war had pro-
duced in other countries. On the train was a newspaper
editor who was a Member of Parliament. He talked
in French, and in his frock-coat and striped Bond Street
trousers and patent leather shoes squatted with his
knees under him. He told me that Turkey was fighting
for liberty from foreign interference, and he pictured

CAPTIVITY

37

the new empire that would grow from victory. He
spoke in a Western language of Western ideas, but he
was Eastern in mentality and habits.

We came out of the Anatolian plateau down on to
the shores of the Sea of Marmora, running through the
rich little villages that are grouped on its northern
shore, till we saw before us St. Sophia and the Great
Seraglio and Stambul slumbering in the late autumn
sun.

I was taken to the great hospital of Skutari that faces
Stambul across the mouth of the Bosphorus. In my
ward were a dozen Turkish ofScers suffering from foul
and loathsome diseases, and a Russian Tartar officer, a
wild, mad fellow with a good heart. Close by were a
number of British soldiers with amputated arms and
legs waiting to be exchanged. They were the victims
of a reprisal. The Ottoman Government had heard of
some arrangement for the Turkish prisoners in Egypt
of which they did not approve. To square matters
they ordered these poor wounded prisoners to be put
into an Armenian church, their bandages removed and
to be left to fend for themselves. There was an Austra-
lian who had been wounded in the ankle. In the church
the wound gangrened and his leg had to be amputated
just below the hip. Now they were full of good cheer
and had asserted their independence and bullied the
hospital staff. But the arrangements for the exchange
fell through, and we prepared to be sent to a prison
camp.

It was a terrible place, that hospital. As two Ger-
man sisters supervised an army of cleaners who were

38 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

always at work, it was clean, but the corridors were
full of dead and dying. Doctors visited and wrote
prescriptions and ordered diets, but there were no
medicines to be issued, and as to diet, what the patient
could afford and what the hospital orderly could buy
decided that. The sick who were brought in from
the various fronts were starved, and all organization
seemed to have broken down. Pneumonia and dysentery
found easy prey in their starved bodies, and they died
in hundreds. The corridors as well as the wards were
crowded. The dirty attendants, in filthy uniforms and
with slip-on shoes or just socks full of holes, took little
notice of the patients. I saw men die with a rattle
while the attendants finished a game of cards close by.
Their main duties were to carry away the dead. The
rows of unattended, unwatched, pallid dying were
unspeakably terrible ; and yet in all tills hospital I heard
no one complain.

Ag ains t US, their enemies, I found no animosities.
Even the German nurses, though full of fierce patriotism,
did all they could for us. The Turkish officers were
courteous and polite. They showed no enthusiasm
for the war. They avoided all controversial subjects.
When we happened to talk of the war, they told me
glowing accounts of the success of the British troops.
It was a curious trait of the Turks to over-represent the
success of the enemy. Thus, when we had captured
Bagdad they assured me that we were in Mosul.

Only once did we seriously disagree. As is their
custom, they used to wake at two in the morning, turn
on the electric light and smoke, talk, and even sing. The

CAPTIVITY

39

Tartar officer and I found this a very wearisome practice.
So when the first light showed before dawn and the
cocks began to crow we took station at opposite corners
of the room and solemnly called the Call to Prayer,
imitating all the trills and affectations of the professional
Muezzin. And while I called that “ God is great ’’
the Tartar, who was a Moslem, kept up a running com-
ment of:

Get up, you lazy beasts. A Giaour^ an unbe-
liever, calls you to prayer. Are you not ashamed to
lie abed ?

At first there were faint querulous complaints from
the other beds, and then stronger, till the room was
full of protests, and one Turk cried out and asked
what was the matter, and the Tartar replied:

If you can wake and sing and smoke when the night is
black, it is a small thing for you to wake and pray in the
rose of dawn,’^ and I bellowed the special call for the
morning :

Prayer is better than sleep.’’

Henceforth we slept in peace, and when they smoked
in the night the Turks held the cigarettes shielded
under the palm of the hand.

Below my window was the cemetery in which lie
buried the British who died during the Crimean War.
They had died to keep the Russian out of Constantinople,
and less than 6o years later we had promised the city
to Russia as the reward of victory. From below the
cemetery came up the sounds of the whistles and snorts
of the trains in Haidar Pasha station, which is the Turkish
junction on the Berlin to Bagdad railway. Much of the

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

40

world’s history had been connected with that route.
Cyrus of Persia and Alexander of Macedon and half the
world’s conquerors have marched along it. In the
hands of a Great Power it always has been, and it is to-day,
the key to the Middle East, threatening Egypt, Arabia,
Irak, and even the Indies. The Germans had got that
control and the power to use it, and this was one of
the potent factors that led to the Entente and the World
War.

To the right of the hospital was a courtyard, and
there the recruits awaiting medical inspection and the
men discharged from hospital assembled each day. A
sergeant dealt out a loaf of bread all round and grouped
the men into parties of eight. From each group he
selected a man, issued a tin bowl to him, fell them in
and marched them off. They came back singly with the
bowl full of soup. As soon as they arrived at their
own group each man produced a wooden spoon, sat
down on his heels and all set to work to ladle up as much
as they could. On this ration twice a day in prosperous
times, and some two shillings a month in pay, the Turkish
soldier marched and fought, wearing the same clothes
summer and winter without change till they fell to pieces ;
and he complained but little.

Sometimes a recruit failed to get his share of the soup.
I watched him with uplifted spoon protest to the sergeant,
who was a little squat fellow with a square face like a
disgruntled bull-dog. He and the recruit would advance
on each other with arms uplifted, calling on Allah in
many wonderful ways. Face to face they would exhibit
such a wealth of gesture and language that it seemed to

CAPTIVITY

41

me inevitable that a fierce fight must result. Suddenly
the recruit would shrug his shoulders in despair and
turn away and the little man would stump off on his bow
legs. At fifty yards, as at a given signal, they would
turn round and come tearing down on each other gesticu-
lating and calling aloud, and would then repeat the same
scene. Even a third and fourth repetition of this would
occur, and then the sergeant would stump off for good,
and the recruit with a shrug, and often with a grin,
would squat down with his friends and roll a cigarette.
Quarrels in this strange country seemed to have a recog-
nized formality.

in the bed on my right was a young Turkish officer,
a nephew of Enver Pasha, the Minister of War and to all
intents and purposes the dictator of Turkey. Enver
visited his nephew and then turned to me. He was a
small, clean-cut, handsome little man with more self-
assurance than ability, but with unlimited courage.
He had that element of drive and energy that the Turk as
a rule lacks. He had moreover the power of persistent
effort which is the rarest quality in the East, He appeared
to be a dangerous man in a comer, and one who would
take great risks because he believed that his luck would
pull him through. He inquired as to my health, and
politely regretted that the exchange of prisoners had
failed. Pie hoped that I was comfortable, and told
me that the Turkish nation would treat me as its honoured
guest. That phrase of “ honoured guest ” angered me.
It had been said to us by high dignitaries at Mosul and
Bagdad and Aleppo and in Kustamouni. Suddenly I
realized that it was owing to this man’s orders that the

42 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

desert road was littered with the corpses of good British
soldiers and that a score lay mutilated in the next ward.
Seeing him only through the red haze of anger, I sum-
moned all my scanty Turkish to my assistance and bade
him get away and go to the devil. He was unmoved,
but in French he politely regretted my lack of courtesy
and gave orders that I should be removed forthwith to
the prison at the Ministry of War.

CHAPTER V

The Stambul Prison

A MILITARY policeman, with a collar round his
neck like a dog’s with a tablet to show who
he was, came to fetch me. The Turkish
officers assured me that I was to be lodged in one of the
grand hotels of Pera, but now I had learnt the etiquette
of the country and so I invited them all to dine with me
at the “ Grand Hotel.”

With my policeman I crossed over by boat from the
Asiatic side to Stambul. A street arab found us a crazy
cab, which took us up narrow steep twisting streets of
cobbles, so crowded that the driver cracked his whip and
called continuously to obtain room to pass. In the half
evening light these jumbled streets with their nondescript
crowds seemed fantastic and unreal.

We drove up to a tall gateway where a sentry halted
us and we got out and walked. It was the great square
of the War Office. Above us the tower of Stambul, from
where the watchman calls the alarm for fires, stood clear
up into the night sky. The moon was sinking cool and
wonderful and the stars twinkled merrily. Below us
was Stambul, alive with lamps, and the Golden Horn
tom into long streab of light as motor-boats raced across

43

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

44

it. The roar of the great city came up to us. The even-
ing air tasted good and sweet. We came to a long, low
red building, and a sentry opened double iron doors and
called a sergeant, who took us in. As the doors crashed
to behind me, my soul revolted. From below us came
up the foul stench of unclean men and unclean rooms. I
was still weak and shaky after my illness, and the reek
made my gorge rise.

In a small ojEce the governor of the prison, Jemal Bey,
received me. He was a small man, slim, smart and neat,
with a cruel face and steel-blue eyes that, like a snake’s,
never winked. He was Enver’s jackal. This prison
was the scene of many tragedies, and many unwanted
persons had died in it of typhus or some other convenient
disease. It was Jemal who had to do this dirty work.

He led me down an iron staircase, along dark passages
where on each side were cellar-like rooms crowded with
three-tier beds and prisoners by the hundred, till we
came to a wooden door. This he opened and indicated
that I was to enter. I drew back, for it was dark, and he
gave some order to the sentry, who pushed me roughly
in and closed the door, and I heard Jemal’s spurs go
clanking down the stone passage as he walked away.

Suddenly an electric light was turned on, and I saw that
I was in a narrow and short but lofty little room and that
the electric light was far up in the ceiling. It was so
narrow a room that it was only just large enough to hold
two beds end to end. It appeared to be half underground
and a grating high in one wall gave air. There was a
touch of humour in it — ^this mediaeval dungeon fitted
with one crown of modern civilization, electricity as light.

THE STAMBUL PRISON

45

It came to me that it was typical of all I had seen in this
country, this insertion of the wonders of progressive
Europe into the primitive unchanged base of Asia.

On the farther bed sat a man who swayed and ran a
string of beads through his fingers and said his prayers
softly, looking always fixedly up at the little grating.
After a while he turned round, bade me welcome, and
we fell into conversation as far as my broken Turkish
allowed. It transpired that he was here for the murder
of his wife, and for many a long day we discussed the
ethics of wife-murder. He taught me much — of the
way to bribe the soldier with the smallest amount
necessary to get food and permission to carry out the
ordinary decencies of life, and he gave me an insight
into the mind of a fatalist that sees no use in effort. He
had no regrets, because it was inevitable that he should
have murdered the woman, as it was inevitable, and
already written whether or no he should be hung. He
amused himself by laboriously cleaning each day a
celluloid collar and then wrapping it up in paper and
hanging it on a nail. He made life uncomfortable in
some ways, for I had to sleep on my boots and money
and anything else thievable, but when they came one
night and dragged him away I missed him sadly.

I had lost count of days, though I could not have
been long in this cell. I had little to do except to listen
to the tread of the sentry, or the clank of a chained
prisoner as he swept out the corridor. On the bed
there was a straw mattress alive with great big bugs
that swarmed in hundreds, and with them came fleas.
In desperation I caught them and quickly filled a match-

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

46

box of the dead and alive. I made a neat parcel of the
box and gave it to the sentry, telling him that it was very
valuable and to be delivered straight to Enver Pasha.
Whether it reached its destination I cannot say, but
next day a band of convicts under a wai-der cleaned
out my loathsome cell. Life was as mean and unliveable
as it well could be. I sat in the cold, sometimes in the
dark, sometimes with the electric light, with nothing to
do and only as much food as I could bribe the good-
natured but equally hungry sentry to bring, without
change of clothes or wash or shave, except an occasional
splash in cold water, and with my clothes alive with
vermin.

With a pencil and paper I slowly scratched in Turkish
a letter of protest to the Governor of Stambul. It
produced a sudden and quite unexpected reply. I was
summoned to his office, and under escort I came out
blinking into the sun, across the Great Square and so
up the marble steps by the gateway and into the
Governor’s house. I found myself in a large room
fitted with uncomfortable Victorian furniture. Facing
me behind a large writing-table was a handsome man
with a big body and a strong face. He held my letter
in his hand. “ What do you mean,” he began in French,
“ by writing to me in this insolent way ? ”

“ What,” I replied, “ do you mean by shutting me,
a British officer and a prisoner-of-war, into a filthy
condemned cell without light or exercise ? ”

The man was a bully. His manner changed at once.
“ Perhaps my French is not good,” he said, and called
to a woman who sat veiled on a sofa. He bade the guard

THE STAMBUL PRISON

47

call Jemal Bey from the prison and to wait outside.
The woman stepped forward and lifted her veil. I was
astounded. This was the first time that I had seen a
Turkish woman of the aristocratic class. Her eyes
were black and set in a face as white and clear as pure
marble so that the veins showed blue through the skin.
Her hair was hidden in a dainty little cloak that was
drawn over it and was tied under it behind, coming
down round the shoulders as far as the hands. Two
curls alone showed over the ears. She wore high-
heeled French shoes and silk stockings and a shortish
skirt that was pleated to the waist. She spoke perfect
English in a soft modulated voice and translated into
smooth Turkish so that it was like the running of water
over a hollow rock into a hidden pool. She was scented
and exquisitely dainty.

The lady dropped her veil as Jemal entered. He was
bullied and cursed by the Governor and eventually he
was beaten across the face and ordered away. I am
sure that he had only carried out his orders, but the
Governor hated the Germans and Enver, and what
Enver had ordered would be to him automatically wrong.

I returned to a new room in the prison, light and airy,
and looking out over the city. At times I was allowed
into a garden with an escort. Below me was a sheer
wall some eighty feet high, and below that the city of
Stambul ran down straight to the Golden Horn that was
for ever alive with boats. Beyond was Pera, and far
away to the right Skutari and the blue Sea of Marmora
and the mountains of Anatolia. Beside me was the
Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent, with its great

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

48

massive domes and its delicate minarets, from which the
Muezzin would call to prayer, and then all the other
mosques would take up the call.

As I went from my room to the garden through the
corridors I passed many of the huge cells full of prisoners.
I could see them playing cards. Men of all ages and of
all classes, by the look of it, appeared to be muddled
together. They stank as if with pestilence, but it was
merely accumulated dirt. They seemed to be a com-
munity apart, gambling and drinkmg tea and dragging
their chains about clanking on the floor. They formed
a sort of subterranean world living its own life. Some-
where there was a torture-room for I heard regular
blows and screams and groans, but my guards denied
its existence. All the prison was foul and full of evil
smells.

I was treated now with as much leniency as previously
I had been treated harshly. I was allowed, with my police-
man, to go into the tovm and buy things. There were
troops in the Great Square practising the goose-step,
but beyond that and many German ofKcers racing about
in powerful cars there was little or no sign of war. This
city appeared to be outside it and uninterested. I
realized that the soul of the Ottoman Empire had long
since fled, but that a few capable vigorous men, such as
Enver, kept flogging the body on to fresh efforts.

In the prison I was given more liberty. My door
was always open. My guard grew slack. One morning
I saw that he was asleep and that his fez had fallen off.
In a second I was out. The greasiness of his fez revolted
me, but I put it on. In the grey light I picked my way

THE STAMBUL PRISON

49

cautiously through the corridors till I came to the
unfinished gate by the garden and there I saw that the
sentry had gone to drink tea. Dawn was just coming
up over the Marmora. Below in the city blue smoke
began to float up in wisps, as the world woke. I could
hear the sentry sucking noisily at his tea. I stepped
out and round the corner to a point I had noted on the
wall, where the ground below ran up steeply and a tele-
graph pole came within a few feet of the top of the
wall.

I looked over. It was sheer down and beyond that
the hill fell away almost sheer. Gripping my fear, I
lay down on the top of the wall and prepared to roll
over and hang by my arms while my feet felt for the
strut that held the telegraph pole to the wall. I dared
not look down, for I am no great hand at heights. As I
hesitated one second before I slipped over I felt my
sleeve furtively plucked. By me stood my guard with
terror in his eyes. He beckoned me back, indicating
that I should keep silent. He replaced his fez on his
head and together we returned quietly. As we passed
the gate I heard the sentry still sucking at his tea.
Hereafter my guards did not sleep on duty and watched
me closely.

£

CHAPTER VI

The Prison Camp in Anatolia

O NE day Jemal Bey brought me orders to get
ready to go to Afion-Kara-Hissar, a prisoners’
camp in Anatolia. With him he brought a
policeman and he showed me to the door of the prison.
I think he was glad to see the last of me. I was an
unknown quantity, and a potential source of trouble. In
his cold-blooded steely-eyed way he saluted me as if I was
a prince of the blood. The sentry stood to attention and
in my dirty old clothes I strode away with my policeman.

We threaded our way down the steep crowded streets,
but my policeman gave me no chance to slip away. We
had to wait for a boat on Galata Bridge while evening
turned to night. The Golden Horn came down to us
in a curve. It was packed with Arab-looking craft that
lie in here for the night and make a forest of masts.
Beyond them the Turkish destroyers stood out grim.
A motor-boat or two raced noisily to its moorings. A
German submarine slid stealthily under the bridge on
the way out to sea. On one side Galata and Pera were
grouped, gaunt and sordid towns, ill-civilized and ugly.
On the other was Stambul, picturesque and frankly
Eastern. A mist crept up and clothed the city in

50

THE PRISON CAMP IN ANATOLIA 51

mystery. The moon warmed from cold cloud white to
yellow as it sailed up the sky. It threw the mosques
and minarets into dark shadows, and its reflection
swayed and shivered on the water as some boat broke
the surface into waves. A fish leaped where there was
a path of light between the boats. Far away a watchman
called and beat on the ground with his pole, and near
at hand his mate replied. Two Arabs in a boat below
us were cooking in a brazier. The night was full of
untrammelled liberty, and when my policeman called
me to come I was minded to break away.

We came once more to Haidar Pasha station, and
passed the barrier where the police were searching
passengers for gold or silver and giving paper in exchange.
Before we had travelled an hour the train stopped, and
I was invited by a crowd of officers to see the place where
a British submarine had shelled a train. She had dived
under the mines in the narrow Dardanelles, crossed the
inland Sea of Marmora and here in the centre of the
enemy’s country opened fire. The Turks congratulated
me on the courage of the commander. They looked on it
as a fine feat and one to be made much of. I could not
help thinking that a German or an Englishman would have
taken a far different view if it had been in his country.

We travelled back to Eski-Shehir and down the line
towards Konia, in the same old haphazard way. It
was the main line of communication for the armies
fighting in Syria and Mesopotamia. At the various
stations Germans endeavoured to hurry things up and
instil some energy into the traffic, but they ran straight
into a stone wall of indifference, and with this indifference

52

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

was mixed a bitter dislike. The Germans treated the
Turks with high contempt, and more than one told me
how glad he was to meet another white man in this
“ native country. They were the motive driving
force endeavouring to get the old, patched, broken-
down rusty machinery of the Ottoman Empire to work.
I was treated with respect. I was confided in by both
Germans and Turks as to the failings of the other ;
and I was an enemy and a prisoner. Everything that
went wrong was put down to the Germans. If there
was a fire, German soldiers had started it. If food was
short, it had been shipped to Berlin to feed Germans.
Sometimes this ill-feeling blazed out into a quarrel. I
saw a German private get into a carriage with Turkish
officers and refuse to get out. As if ready for this, a
dozen Turks rushed at him and dragged him out and
locked him into a waiting-room.

We came to Afion-Kara-Hissar, that stands high up
in the Anatolian plateau, and found it had the same
narrow valley, the same castle on a rock and the same
broad plain beyond, as there was at Kustamouni ; only
that here in the plain they grew miles of glowing red
poppies instead of com.

There had been a camp here for a long time, and
some 200 officers, British, French and Russian, were
imprisoned. Once more I settled down to the dx-eary
monotony of a prisoner’s life. Time slipped by un-
noticed. There was, between the houses in which we
lived, a narrow street to walk in by day. All day and
every day there was nothing to do. We made work.
We walked in the street. We read aimlessly the books

THE PRISON CAMP IN ANATOLIA 53

we got occasionally from home. The future was un-
certain. We might be here for years. One pessimist
told us that French prisoners had been kept in England
from 1793 to 1815. We kept our self-respect only by
truculence to our captors. We became detached and,
even about the World War, impassive. Our news was
from German communiques, and it all seemed distant
and vague. We lived closed together without privacy,
without for one minute being able to get away from each
other. We lived so close, cheek by jowl, that we did
not realize that we grew older. Life stood still. There
was no movement nor definite clear-cut action. We
were unmoved like rocks on a hillside among other rocks.
There seemed to be no past nor any future. Time did not
pass. No one grew old or changed, for we grew side by
side and being so close we did not see — ^unless some one
blossomed out into grey hair or lapsed into imbecility.

We were a monastic community, without the ideals
and enthusiasm of monks, or the rigid discipline and
definite future of convicts. Our food was the coarse
peasant food of the country and as poor as that of any
monastery. No woman came into our lives, but we had
no strong vows of celibacy to keep the warmth of youth
out of our blood. At the sight, far out beyond the
road, of a woman, be she ever so ill-favoured and dirty,
a thrill of excitement ran down the street. This absence
of a component part of life had its distinct effect, and
we became after a while numb and half-senseless. The
Russian prisoners had a woman or two hidden among
them disguised as men, until they quarrelled over them
and the Turks found out. The French officers were

54

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

frank. They received from their wives, ;not photographs
or trinkets as mementoes, but pieces of dainty under-
clothing which they kept beneath their pillows. The
British tried to avoid facts and succeeded to some extent.
I realized that a life free from woman would be free
from the passionate despondent hours, of the nights of
despair, of heart-burnings and remorse, but that it
would be stale, flat, and tasteless ; for even in remorse
there is a touch of self-satisfied pride.

I could not sit idle. Against the established general
opinion of the camp that it was wrong to attempt it, I
prepared to escape. At the eleventh hour our plans
were given away, and late one night I was called before
the commandant of the camp. He was a foul beast,
half Arab and half Turk, with the vices of both. He
was a short sturdy man with a coarse evil face, named
Mazlum Bey. He had committed terrible bestialities,
beaten men to death, stolen our food, and done unname-
able offences by force on our soldiers imprisoned else-
where in the town. When angered he became a wild
raging madman capable of any atrocity. I lied to him
freely and he believed not a word because he had expected
such lies and I and my four companions were shut into
two rooms and isolated from the rest of the camp until
we should give our parole.

For a while resentment kept our spirits up, but as the
days grew into weeks and the weeks into months I ceased
to notice the exact details of the passage of time. I
tried philosophically to let life slip past me, but it
travelled on unoiled wheels and with difficulty. Day
after day and night after night I sat and watched the

THE PRISON CAMP IN ANATOLIA 55

sky from the window. I could see one little patch
between the house-tops. Sometimes far up in its blue
a kite wheeled and cried, or a swallow raced across it,
or a pigeon shot home with a swoop. Sometimes a
great free bird would float lazily across it. At night it
became alive with stars. I swore that in my life I would
never again keep any wild animal in captivity. The
sun was but the passing of shadow and light on walls
opposite. I never walked in it. By straining hard out
against the bars I could see up the road a skimpy bit
of tree that showed half its branches to me. It budded
and became green. It put out rich leaves. It turned
yellow and once more became bare arms swaying in the
driving snow. And still the eternal time stood still,
just swinging in and out from day into night and back
again. I became too tired to sit or lie down, and then
too tired to sleep. I thought of great deep gulps of
strong air after some hard game ; of the smell of free
running water in the spring and the light green of young
willows on the Cher at Oxford, of the pulse of a horse
moving under me, of the kick of life and freedom, and
then of long, deep, dreamless sleep held soft and warm
in the arms of unconsciousness. This was the Hell
of the Living Dead. I fancied that perhaps we were
dead and unknowingly we were in Hell. I told Robin
Paul, who was in the next room. He pondered awhile.
“ No,” he said, “ it cannot be Hell, for I never did any-
thing bad enough for this.”

Our persistency, in refusing our parole, had hardened
to sullen obstinacy, when suddenly the Turks grew
tired and we returned to the camp as before.

CHAPTER VII

The Fall of the Ottoman Empire : Release,

1918

A S is ever the way with the Turks, they now
swung to the other extreme, and our treat-
ment became as liberal as it had before been
stringent. I was made staff-officer of the camp. Maz-
lum Bey was put under arrest with all his officers. To
complete the picture, the sergeant of the guard, having
no officer to whom to apply, as they were all in prison,
and being quite bewildered, came to me for his day’s
orders. These I gave to him written out laboriously
in my crude Turkish. Mazlum was tried for his foul-
ness, and on the court I was the prosecutor and inter-
preter. Such was the humour of the situation.

We were given more liberty. At times we got opportu-
nities to talk to some of our men imprisoned in another
part of the town. We learnt the details of their march
up and how all across the Mesopotamian plains and in
the unorganized camps both British and Indians had
died by ffie thousand. It appeared that hopeless ineffi-
ciency and callousness of human life was the main causes,
while deliberate calculated cruelty was rare. The Turks
had treated our worn and starved and diseased soldiers

56

FALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 57

as they treated their own men, and both had died like
flies. Now in a sort of death-bed repentance at this
eleventh hour the Ottoman Government was treating
them with great kindness and giving them much liberty.
But of the thousands that set out from Kut only a few
hundred remained. These were probably better treated
than any prisoners have been treated before, except the
Russians in Japan. They ran their own affairs , attempted
escapes without punishment, and worked as they
willed.

As to the officers, as a whole they were pretty well
treated, but the life of a prisoner-of-war must always
be a dreary hardship.

The iron chain round us began to relax and, as we
gained more liberty, our spirits rose. There were many
attempts at escape. We worked night and day in secret
preparing and studying any maps we could get, and
copying and enlarging passes and plans sent to us from
England in split post-cards or cunningly hidden in
books. But though it was easy to get out of camp,
the country beyond was wild and barren and made a
perfect prison wall. It was full of fierce men. It was
as if one tried to escape from Kabul through the wild
Afghan tribes over the mountains into India.

Everywhere there were signs of the Ottoman Empire
breaking up. In the town, into which we were now
allowed to go under guard, the people talked with open
discontent. The hills were full of deserters and brigands.
Food was short and the prices crept up till only the
rich could buy sugar and tea and the necessaries of life.
Our guards had grown slack. I could feel the break

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

58

coming. The Geimians made great efforts to revive
their Turkish allies to further effort. So important to
the succes of the Central Powers was the co-operation
of Turkey that in 1917 the Kaiser himself paid a state
visit to the Sultan in Stambul. But the vitality of the
Ottoman Empire was already gone.

Within the camp the ordinary life continued. Some
arranged concert parties. Some plotted escapes. Many
sat patiently like stalled oxen and waited for the end.
Some grew wild, and one party gambled heavily. I saw
a player with a bad hand at poker stake his parcels from
home and his pay for a month, and so reduced himself
to living on bread and water for thirty days.

With care I made my own plans for escape with
disloyal Arabs and Greeks, but as ever when the last
minute came they failed me. My final plan was ready
when orders came to exchange sick prisoners. I had
helped to arrange details of the exchange, and was at
the railway station when my attention was directed to
a waggon in a siding with curtains drawn and a sentry
on guard. I was allowed to look in. Inside sat some
forty Germans with their faces in bandages. “ The
Arabs of Feisal,” he continued, “ did that. They took
out their eyes, cut off their ears and cut their tongues
and mutilated them.” In the half-light the men fumbled
aimlessly or sat dead-still as blind men will.

The first exchanges were over. All the sick were
gone when more prisoners for exchange were required.
I ate cordite, that I had kept hidden, till my heart leapt
and sighed, and swallowed hard-boiled eggs till a con-
gested liver turned me yellow. Then with the aid of a

IIICADMKN OF OTTOMAN GliEISK VJLLACIK.S

FALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 59

little sum of money to the doctor I was passed out and
I boarded the train for Smyrna.

I knew little of the war. The battles of the Somme
and Verdun and the Hindenburg Line were vague names
meaning nothing to me. But I could see that, what-
ever was happening elsewhere, in Turkey things were
breaking up. The unwilling worn-out country had been
kept going by the Germans, and I saw these come
streaming back up the line from the Eastern fronts.

In Smyrna it was the same story. The Turks spent
their time trying to please us. We were allowed to go
quite free. The troops stationed above the town were
prepared to revolt. If the war went on much longer
it appeared that there might be a revolution. The
Germans were withdrawing, and with them went the
energy and the driving force. The old cranky patched
machinery of the Ottoman Empire came crashing down
with a run.

While we waited in Smyrna, Bulgaria asked for an
armistice. We put ourselves — for all else was dis-
organized — into the ship that waited for us in the road-
stead. At last we were out, running in the darkness past
Khios, zigzagging for fear of enemy submarines, but
free and riding for Egypt.

CHAPTER VIII

The First Days of the Armistice

A t length in j&ne weather we came to Alexandria,
and after many vexatious delays we got ashore.
There were no preparations to receive us, but
imprisonment had taught us to fend for ourselves, and
we soon found lodgings and clothes. I had always
laughed at and often sneered at the Turks for their
inefficiency, and pictured the methodical regulated run-
ning of any British organization. I had a rude awaken-
ing, for in Egypt I found the same lack of foresight,
the same procrastination, the same galling inefficiency
and the same indifference. We were still in the East.

I spent my short time there during the day in reading
up dispatches and reports in the staff offices, and in
hoping to get on to the French front. I quickly saw
that the system of government in Egypt, as set up by
Milner, was gone. In the old days British officials had
stood secreted behind the Egyptian ministers, guiding
and advismg them. Under the stress of war they had
pushed the Egyptians on one side and frankly taken
control.

With me I had brought a Turkish officer, who had
been involved in some of our schemes in Smyrna. At

60

THE FIRST DAYS OF THE ARMISTICE 6i

night we put on fezes and wandered as Turkish officers
through the alleys and bazaars of Alexandria. In khaki
by day I could find no one who would speak Turkish,
but at night it was the language of half the population.
They crowded round us in caffis, eager to talk and to
get news. They showed their bitter hatred of the British
and bemoaned the lax Turkish government of the old
days.

But we were eager to be off. We took ship and
came to the British camp in Taranto. The East dogged
our steps. The camp was foul and ill run. As we
travelled through Italy I could not but see the disorder
and disorganization.

“ Where have we got to ? ” said one, “ for ‘ East is
Esilt and West is West and never the twain shall meet.’ ”
“ We shall leave the East at the Alps,” replied his
companion.

As we came to the Simplon Tunnel, we heard that
the Germans had signed the Armistice ; and so we
travelled steadily across tom France, and, while they
still celebrated the end of the war, we came eager and
panting with excitement into Dover Harbour.

I found myself in a strange land, not to be confused
with the England that I had left in 1 9 1 3 . It had grappled
blindly in the horror of an immense nightmare, and
now it had awaked in the clear splendid dawn. I was
a stranger, a sort of Rip Van Winkle. I knew nothing
of the stress and strain. I did not know the names
of the great battles in France, nor the catchwords of
the troops. I had never heard of the V.A.D., nor of
the Land Girl. I belonged to another age. I found

62

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

England hard and primitive, full of great enthusiasm,
of great passions, of great hatreds, and of great ideals.
I raced to catch up. I devoured books of war photo-
graphs and read the old newspapers. Only vaguely as
a distant view I saw now and again the stark terror of
the years that I had missed, and the tremendous blind
forces that had been tearing at each other ; but I felt
the great sob of relief of the millions who came back
to light and life and the great fun that was to fill the
world.

In the middle of December I was employed in the
War Office. This allowed me to extend my horizon
from the view-point of personal experience, and with
the eyes of a hundred observers to see the situation as
a whole. I found that England had taken within her
protecting arms vast tracts of new territory — Mesopo-
tamia, Palestine, the Caucasus and parts of Turkey, and
I found a belief that she could cleanse these countries
and put them on the high road to salvation. There
was a splendid hope in a new era that was dawning.

The war machine was still running full, but hardly
had I felt the thrill and the drive of the immense impulse
than reaction came dragging back. The people of Eng-
land clamoured to get back to their homes and their
dancing and their money-making. With the war won,
they naturally concluded that their task was finished.
But it was as if a surgeon in a delicate major operation
had suddenly gone off to his tea and allowed his patient
to bleed to death.

Great empires had been tom into glutinous strips, or
smashed into* brittle or highly explosive pieces. The

THE FIRST DAYS OF THE ARMISTICE 63

world lay full of fragments waiting to be tied up by
the Allies into neat little parcels and correctly labelled,
but the people of England wanted peace and quiet,
retrenchment and demobilization. It was the most out-
standing feature of the moment, and it was the most
important factor in the history of the years of the Armis-
tice. Diplomacy and foreign policy needed a great army.
The settlement of the world required a strong police.
The people of England were not prepared for this
further sacrifice. America frankly withdrew her diplo-
mats with her armies. We withdrew our armies, but
we sent our diplomats to do great things, and they failed
and were shamed.

The War Office was weighed down with masses of
new problems. The ordinary officials there, conscien-
tious but far from brilliant, were called upon to gather
correct material and advise and decide on problems of
vast importance, and at the same time to assist in
administering half a world in turmoil. They were
surrounded by experts and interested persons full of
novel facts. They were supplied with maps that were
rank with errors. A new propaganda grew up with
maps as the posters and advertisements. These were
neatly printed. They looked as authentic as a Bart-
holomew road map. They were often a deliberate per-
version of facts to assist a poor argument. Every move
was hampered by numbers of treaties made under the.
stress of war. These were often contradictory and
now regretted.

In Paris the Conference had started, with no one quite
knowing what it meant, and all the people of the world

64 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

were talking at once. As time passed, in every direc-
tion and in unexpected places, vast blind forces released
by the war became apparent and menacing. To meet
them there was little to offer. The armies were con-
tracting with demobilization. The energy and idealism
was dying away and left only a tired people.

Nowhere had the victory been so crushing as in
Turkey. She lay battered down, ruined and broken.
Any terms of peace could have been imposed without
resistance. Far away in Anatolia the ninth Caucasus
army alone remained undefeated, but it was submissive
and overawed. There were Allied garrisons all across
Turkey. She lay inert, patiently waiting her fate. I
found the English people against the Turks. Here and
there a few experts and a few cranlcs spoke on their
behalf, but the mass of the people was hostile. The
churches remembered the massacres of Christians. The
Free Churches were clamouring for the return of Con-
stantinople and St. Sophia and the ejection of the Turk
from Europe. The war hatred was strong in those
untouched by religion. It was agreed that an end was
to be made of Turkey, and Mr. Lloyd George was the
spokesman of that idea.)

But in all matters the decision rested with the Con-
ference in Paris, and there so vast and complex and
innumerable were the problems to be settled that Turkey
was neglected for the time being. It was felt that she
was but the rubbish and bits of the Ottoman Empire
that had finally collapsed, and that a sweeping up of
those could wait until more urgent problems nearer
home were settled. In that delay lay danger, and

THE FIRST DAYS OF THE ARMISTICE 65

one by one many of the troubles settled themselves.

The first blow came when the Italians on the zgtix
of March 1919 landed in south-eastern Anatolia, and,
despite the protests of the other Allies, began rapidly
to take over the country. They had a definite clear-
cut policy. They intended to replace Austria in the
Near East. They took over the Austrian banks and
the Austrian ships. They had been promised the port
of Smyrna at the Conference of St, Jean de Maurienne
in 1915 and they set out to get it. They were for
annexation. Each year, some hundreds of thousands of
emigrants leave Italy for other countries. The soil and
climate of Anatolia are excellent, and the Italian Govern-
ment hoped to raise there a stout peasant population and
make Italy a world power and an empire.

Already there was friction between France and England,
for the former thought that she was being kept out of
Cilicia, despite all promises and the terms of the Sykes-
Picot agreement, and that steps were being taken to oust
her from Constantinople.

It was still possible by immediate action to settle the
Near East, but the situation, if delayed, was potentially
dangerous.

CHAPTER IX

Central Europe, Italy, Athens, and
Salonika in 1919

I SET out once more for Constantinople in the first
days of April, 1919. Slowly and only with much
labour I travelled aaoss Central Europe. I left
an England still wild with excitement and dancing and
the pleasures of life. The men had come home from
the army with their pockets full of money and no cares
for the future. But in Europe all system and organiza-
tion had broken down. Everywhere there was confu-
sion and with it famine and despair. Starvation and
Bolshevism were twin brothers and together they raced
a neck-and-neck race with the harvest that was just
coming green in the fields. In Switzerland the valleys
were full of the sound of the newly released streams
that sang of spring and of food to come.

As we came out of the Alps on to the plains beyond
we met the spring as she came singing and dancing
out of the dusty East. But it was only the promise of
plenty, and, if civilization was to be saved, there was
need at once of food and comfort. In Italy itself, one
of the victors, there were profound political upheavals
and strikes and discord.

66

CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1919 67

We ran through vineyards and cornfields and red-
roofed villages and then dovm the coast of the Adriatic
with its rocks, and figs and ancient twisted olive trees
and white square flat-roofed Oriental villages set in the
background of the blue sea. Here and there I saw a
red flag, and in many railway-stations pictures of Lenin.
Revolution stood ready at the gate, prepared to burst
in and sweep the plains and the hills bare and leave
the villages desolate. Civilization, weak and pallid,
faced red Anarchy.

We came to Taranto and from there took ship, rounded
the heel of Italy, crossed the Adriatic, ran in behind
the long island of Corfu, and, as the dawn showed grey
over the mainland, we anchored below the two grey
forts that watch over the town of Corfu.

We threaded our way out and down into the Ionian
Islands, through the narrow strait that divides Ithaca
from Cephalonia, and, leaving Messolonghi and its
marshes away on our left, swung eastwards into the
gulf of Corinth and stayed a while in Patras.

Then we sailed dovm the gulf with the towering
barren mountains of Old Greece on our left and the
rich green garden-covered shore of the Morea on our
right.

In these seas each hour of the day and night is full
of wonder. I watched the splendour of the dawn from
Corfu, as the town turned from silver to gold under
the fingers of the newly risen sun. I lazed through
the sunny days, while from the south blew up a soft
vnnd from Africa that carried with it forgetfulness of
care. We passed places renowned for great poets or

68

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

for great deeds done there, and my lazy brain caught
once more the half-forgotten thrill and inspiration of
the ancient classics.

I watched the sun set In a clear sky, a blaze of fierce
colours quenched suddenly to soft tints, and then the
purple night sweep up moonless and profound set deep
with a myriad stars ; while the islands became dim
shapes veiled behind darkness.

Sea and sky and land were rich with colours and
beauties so exquisite that even the honeyed full-mouthed
phrases of Homer seemed inadequate. They left the
aching indefinable sadness that is an integral part of all
great beauty.

The ship passed the narrow Canal of Corinth, skirted
the barren coast of Attica, rounded the island of Salamis,
and so came into the hot bleak port of Piraeus. From
there I took a car and set out for Athens.

For so great a setting modem Athens is a little mean
town. Above it, almost, as it were, isolated, stood the
Acropolis in its unrivalled beauty. At that moment
the town was alive and throbbing with vitality, energy
and the enthusiasm of the victory. Greece was strain-
ing upwards to become great. But the more I saw, the
less I believed in her greatness. She was living on
the froth, of excitement that is all bubbles that burst
easily. The ability to organize and the instinct to rule
were not there. Words were more plentiful than effi-
ciency. I saw that despite the show of vitality the
Greeks were little better than the Turks. I had visited
the Greek prisons and found them as foul as those of
Stambul. That at Patras was full of political prisoners

CENTRAL EUROPE IN 1919 69

who lived in stone vaults underground crowded together
in foulness and indecency. The prisoners never saw
the sun. Their food was handed through the bars of
a grating up to which they had to climb from the dark
vaults underground.

I came to Salonika by ship and waited for transport,
for all the railways in the Balkans were impassable.
The town was full of troops, and in the Turkish quarter
the Greek cavalry were stabled in the mosques. Round
the town were many concentration camps of wretched
depressed Bulgarian prisoners. The once flourishing
port was ruined. The Turks who had stayed were as
cowed and terrified as the Armenians that I had seen
in Anatolia imder the Turkish rule. These peoples,
whether they be Turk or Christian, appear to have no
instinct for ruling.

Above the town on the hill was the massive old stone
fort of Yedi-Kule, now turned into a prison. Inside
it, in the court-yard, were broken shanties oLwood and
round them narrow pens with mud floors. They were
crowded with prisoners. I was up on the battlements
with the sentries in the warm sunlight. Below the fort
lay red-roofed villas set in gardens and trees from whence
came up the scent of flowers and the sound of the sea
breeze playing in the tree tops. Beyond, placid and
blue, lay the harbour and a lazy steamer drawing out
to the open sea. Away in the distance great mountains
towered into light shifting clouds that broke now and
again and showed the snow glittering on their peaks.

I looked down into the fort. It was dark and cold.
I could feel the dreary monotony and the barrenness.

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

70

There were six hundred men crowded together and shut
into slavery for political reasons. Some wandered up
and down the few paces of the pens. I heard a sentry
hit one dully because he came too close to the barrier.
Some lay within the huts. Many were catching lice.
The stench of uncleanness, as of the dead, came up to
me in a heavy sickening vapour. A great bird sailed
lazily across the sky. I was back in Afion-Kara-Hissar
and in revolt — revolt against the folly of war and the
stupidity of politics and the shutting up of men like
savage beasts of prey. With an elfort I realized that
the sky was wide and open, and that I was free and no
prisoner.

I was glad to leave Salonika. It had become a back-
water. The armies were gone to Constantinople and
those who were left were cleaning up to move. I went
aboard with no regret, but there remained with me a
fetid remembrance of the prisoners on the hill, and the
ill-kept Bulgars in the camps.

CHAPTER X

In Constantinople as one of the Victors

T he steward called me late and tihie dawn was
already coming up grey before I was on deck
to watch the ship plough her way up the
Dardanelles. The rocky shores stood out ragged and
raw, uninviting, quite unfriendly and menacing. The
last day’s heat lay heavy in the stony valleys, and there
came down the stale smell that spoke of dust and flies.
A hawk wheeled out as he hunted early. A wedge of
duck fleeted past. Here and there were tired villages,
just waking to the day.

We swung into the Sea of Marmora as the sun rose
on our right. Before us in the spring morning the sea
lay still in exquisite blue. As the dawn broke it left the
Islands of the Princes pearl-grey in the shadow of night
and tipped their peaks with gold. Behind us in great
patches of sun and deep shadow, their feet draped in a
gentle mist, the Anatolian hills climbed steep up into the
mountains of Asia till they reached the everlastmg snows
of Olympus, towering sheer into the sky. Before us,
glittering in the dawn, lay Constantinople, and Stambul
the Turkish city, called in Arabic “ The Gate of De-
light.” It was a mass of minarets and mosques, red-

71

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

72

roofed houses set in trees, reaching down to the point
where the old Seraglio and the Imperial Harems frown
over the sea. Away beyond, divided by the Golden
Horn and spanned by the Bosphorus, stood Pera, once
the old ghetto, where now gaunt brick houses crowded
on the sides of many hills, full of Europeans and rich
people.

We anchored off Leander’s tower where the Bosphorus
runs into the sea, and its fierce current twists and swirls,
mouths at the ships and snarls as it dives down a hundred
feet below sea surface. The waterways were crowded
with shipping and with myriads of small craft that kept
no rules of the road. While we waited I remembered
my last visit here in the hour of defeat, with my police-
man and in my ragged old uniform. Now I came back
on the tide of a stupendous victory and full of hope
of the great future. The Allied passport officers came
aboard. The Frenchman was fussy and a nuisance, be-
cause he could not help it. The Italian nosed round
on the chance of seeing a good-looking woman, because
he could not help it. The Englishman was frankly
bored. Outside England I have often wondered as to
the value of the Passport System. The efficient criminal
and the dangerous politician can easily circumvent it,
I suppose it holds up the feeble-minded and the silly
ass, and that is a blessing.

We landed at the Bridge and plunged into Galata
and into the rattle and roar that is the sound of Con-
stantinople. Instinctively I held my breath, waiting
for the crash. Trams banged and squealed, as they
passed over worn-out points. Motor-cars of aU makes

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

73

dashed about taking risks. Horse-carts without springs
or tyres rattled over the cobbled streets. Oxen swayed
along to the shouts and prods of their drivers. The
pavements and the road were thronged with people
who respected no rule of the road. There were ranges
of flabby white faces without distinction or character.
Here and there I saw a pretty girl, a woman over-painted,
or a man gesticulating over-violently. They were all
over-smoked, slept-in-stale-air, weak, sickly faces. The
people were of every type and gabbled in every tongue.
There were long-bearded Armenian priests with rusty
gowns and chimney-pot hats, and Greek priests in top-
hats with the brims knocked off and dirty shabby boots
sticking out from under dingy gowns. There were
hodjas in turbans, Turks and French colonial troops in
fezes. There were slit-eyed Kalmucks, great gaunt
eunuchs, Turkish bloods of the Effendi and Pasha class,
men with hats on, as in London, men with black astrakan
brimless caps on, just as in Teheran or Tiflis. There
were women in veils and women in hats, and street
vendors and beggars with horrors of open sores and
mutilated limbs asking for alms. Some loitered talking
and sucking cigarettes. The rest elbowed and rushed,
twisted, turned and butted me off the narrow pave-
ments into the complicated medley of vehicles in the
road. Ever3rwhere there was confusion, noise and
bustle, but all this effort appeared to have no object.
It had nothing in common with that great purposeful
hum of traffic that is the voice of London.

I regretted having decided to walk up to Pera, for the
hills were as steep as cliffs and the pavements were

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

73

dashed about taking risks. Horse^carts without springs
or tyres rattled over the cobbled streets. Oxen swayed
along to the shouts and prods of their drivers. The
pavements and the road were thronged with people
who respected no rule of the road. There were ranges
of flabby white faces without distinction or character.
Here and there I saw a pretty girl, a woman over-painted,
or a man gesticulating over-violently. They were all
over-smoked, slept-in-stale-air, weak, sickly faces. The
people were of every type and gabbled in every tongue.
There were long-bearded Armenian priests with rusty
gowns and chimney-pot hats, and Greek priests in top-
hats with the brims knocked off and dirty shabby boots
sticking out from under dingy gowns. There were
hodjas in turbans, Turks and French colonial troops in
fezes. There were slit-eyed Kalmucks, great gaunt
eunuchs, Turkish bloods of the Effendi and Pasha class,
men with hats on, as in London, men with black astrakan
brimless caps on, just as in Teheran or Tiflis. There
were women in veils and women in hats, and street
vendors and beggars with horrors of open sores and
mutilated limbs asking for alms. Some loitered talking
and sucking cigarettes. The rest elbowed and rushed,
twisted, turned and butted me off the narrow pave-
ments into the complicated medley of vehicles in the
road. Everywhere there was confusion, noise and
bustle, but all this effort appeared to have no object.
It had nothing in common with that great purposeful
hum of traffic that is the voice of London.

I regretted having decided to walk up to Pera, for the
hills were as steep as cliffs and the pavements were

74

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

made of awkward cobbles. I was bumped by hurryir
men going nowhere, and poked by the elbows ar
amazingly sharp bones of women who, I feel sure, we:
otherwise quite charming. But at last I came to whe
I should lodge in a street that is known as the Ri
Glavanni.

In moments of depression my first night in th
street comes back to me. The everlasting sun h;
banked the heat down in it, as sullenly as in an ove
It was full of the smell of open drains and garbaj
refuse thrown from the windows or tipped out of ti
by scavenger dogs. It was full of men arguing and t
howls of itinerant sellers of fruit and trifles. Oppos
unreceivable ladies played on a tin piano and call
to sailor-men to come and drink. The creeping nig
was full of tickling, crawling things which, unless ow
gorged at their supper, showed phenomenal speed
hiding under the pillow before the match struck. Tl
were my old prison companions and great brown brut
but soft London life had made me less friendly towai
them.

Being unable to sleep, at dawn I crept out to
Petits Champs des Morts, which is a deserted gravey
that runs steep down to the Golden Horn and is cove:
with litter and full of tired cypresses. Above it 1
been built a cabaret, and there the night before I 1
spent an hour or two, smoking innumerable cigaret
drinking bad champagne at fabulous prices, sipp
black coffee and watching over-painted middle-a
women skip lightly about a crazy stage. This is
night life of Constantinople. Now at dawn the >

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

75

and the Golden Horn lay covered deep in fog. As I
looked the morning breeze sprang up out of the Black
Sea and swept away the surface of the fog, and one by
one the minarets and tops of innumerable mosques
came up into the sun, glittering like silver islands in the
sea of mist.

I began work, without delay, at the Embassy as
Assistant Military Attach^, and my life became full of
! politics. I found the Ottoman Empire utterly smashed,
i her vast territories stripped into pieces, and her con-
quered populations blinded and bewildered by their
sudden release. The Turks were worn out, dead-tired,
and without bitterness awaited their fate. Any terms
of peace could have been imposed without resistance.
Throughout the Near and Middle East there was stability
and peace, for the British had stretched out their hands
and there were garrisons holding all the vast territories
that lie between Batum and Trans-Caucasia, North
Persia, Basra and Jerusalem. Only in the East of
Anatolia there were rumblings of revolt where the
ninth and unbeaten Turkish Caucasian Army was
reluctant to disarm, and where there was the menace
of Russian interference. For a minute the British
tasted the immense prestige of force and world power.
The Allied prestige was enormous. It overshadowed
the East. The eclipse of Russia and the destruction
of the Ottoman Empire had cleared the ground, but left
vast problems for decision. Countries had been tom
from their old allegiances and ripped into pieces. The
debris of the old order waited to be constmcted into a
new system.

76

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

As in the War Office so in the Embassy, I found the
corridors crowded with experts and persons with interests.
They came from Georgia and Azerbaijan, from Smyrna
and the Pontus, from Armenia and Palestine. They
brought with them their maps full of lies and they
expected the almighty Allies with a few chosen words
and a wave of the hand to decide their futures. As yet
the chill of the reaction that I had seen coming in London
had not reached Turkey. All waited on the Confer-
ence, and in Paris they were too busy with other problems
nearer home and as yet had no time.

The chance of sound reconstruction slid away on
the wings of time. Gradually the power of the Allies
weakened, as the armies contracted to the centre with
demobilization. One by one the garrisons were with-
drawn, and the new countries still half-fledged were
left to fend for themselves. Among themselves the
Allies quarrelled. Each fought on the terms of its
own national interests. For a minute they had thought
in terms of the World. The Conference at Paris be-
came heated with discord, and each decision made was
but a compromise between rival claims. The reaction
put out its cold hand, and the great dream of a new
world dissolved and the nations came back to the cold
light of facts.

But the problems of the Near East still remained
undecided, and one by one under the pressure of cir-
cumstance each new country in pain and grief worked
out its own salvation.

In Constantinople the Allied administration had
been formed on the supposition that it was an expedient

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

77

for a few weeks. It had no order of efficiency. The
High Cominissioner was the Admiral Commanding
the Mediterranean, and he had under him a mixed
staff. The French General, Franchet d’Esperey, who
had commanded in Macedonia, was left as Commander-
in-Chief ashore. His British subordinate, General Sir
George Milne, was in the quaint position of being
an independent commander of a force called the Army
of the Black Sea ; but practically the whole of this
force was also commanded, under the French General
Officer Commanding-in- Chief, by the Allied Commander
of the Constantinople area, and he was a British
General, Lieut.-General Sir Henry Wilson. The rela-
tionship between the French and British commanders
was unsympathetic, and the above description should
be sufficiently complex to show the impracticable system
that was in existence. There was no common policy
nor even common sentiment among the Allies, and
there was no co-ordination of men or force.

As to the British, there was no settled policy and
for the first twelve months no general line of policy was
laid down, except that the High Commissioner should
avoid all complications that might affect future decisions.
The results were pathetic, for the High Commissioners
did little but watch each other jealously and ensure that
none of their colleagues obtained any special advantages.
The Near East waited for reconstruction, but the Allies
did nothing that was constructive. Their decisions
were all negative. Minor difficulties as they arose
were referred to the home Governments, and decisions
on these appeared to have no part in a general policy.

78 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The main work at the Embassy was to avoid being
definitely involved with any of the innumerable suitors
who sought our help.

Thus in inaction time passed, while the problems at
hand remained unsolved, while new complications
appeared and definite dangers began to raise their heads.
The golden opportunity to make a sound adjustment
had passed.

I found the city of Constantinople little changed since
1916, except that the Allies had replaced the Germans
and that the population had without effort transferred
its allegiance from the one to the other. I looked in
at the old prison. Jemal Bey was gone, but the officials
and sentries were as courteous as before. Mazlum Bey
was shut away somewhere, but I dared not see him, for
I must have struck him. Even here in the centre, there
was decay. The War Office door hung on a broken
hinge, and the great courtyard was rank with weeds,
as if no troops had ever drilled on it.

As I wandered about the city I searched for the stout
old Turk I had learned to know in Anatolia. He was
not there. Gradually I realized that in Constantinople
there were no Turks, for they were all Levantines, and
that herein lay the basic and fundamental problem of
Turkey. Away in Anatolia were 7,000,000 ignorant
Turkish peasants. They were hardy, honest and steady,
but should anyone of them be taken and educated, he
instinctively absorbed that which was superficial and he
became a Levantine,

Though of stout material, the Turkish peasant cannot
be built on, and thus his ruling class is always Levantine.

IN CONSTANTINOPLE

79

The one hope of the Turk lies in developing his own
type of civilization, of educating his people on those lines,
and ruling his people in this manner, and not by copying
or mimicking the civilization of Europe as he has done
hitherto. The Turks are Eastern. Anatolia and Con-
stantinople are Eastern, and there is a great danger of
treating them as if they were Western, because their
people have white skins and some are Christians. The
gulf between us and the Chinese and the Brahmin is
no greater than that between us and the populations of
Turkey.

Constantinople is the capital of Levantinia^ and its
citizens the Levantines are the evil results of the mating
of the East and the West. East and West mate badly.
They do not absorb each other satisfactorily. The West
has superimposed itself on the East, and there remain
but two roads to be taken. Either the East must accept
the civilization of the West and the whole East become
Levantine, or it must refuse it absolutely and revolt
against it. But the moment the East refuses the guidance
of the West, I found that the East respected not the
spirit but the material results of Western civilization —
its motor-cars, its luxuries, and, above all, the power and
comfort that it gives.

The great city of Constantinople is itself a festering
sore. There are in it no great ideals, no inspiration.
It is a city of mean men living in mean streets. It
is a city of intrigue, of backbiting, of scandal, of cun-
ning, cowardly, treacherous men and dishonest women
living in squalid houses. There is vast intrigue in little
matters. There is no big idea, no character, no drive, no

8o

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

continuous effort, no virtue. Spread over all is the
fatalism that destroys effective action, and the mentality
of Constantinople is complete. It is a city that has
ruined the souls of all who come to it. It is the jumble
of pieces of an ugly jig-saw puzzle that no one has yet
made into a picture.

Yet it is set in an exquisite frame. Around it are the
rolling uplands of Mashlah, the deep shady valleys of
the Belgrade forest, the Bosphorus with its swift green
rushing current, the fathomless blue of the Marmora
and the hills of Anatolia rising peak on peak to the
sunrise. Set in this girdle of wonderful seas, of won-
derful hills and lit with gorgeous sunsets, it lies a festering
pool of iniquity of all that is foul in human nature, and
of all the squalor of deformed city life. Everywhere
there are the same great contrasts of great beauty, exalted
imagery, great possibilities and twisted ugliness, squalor,
and futile mean effort, and foulness. Looked at from
afar, it excites romance. It is exquisite with its mosques
and minarets and baths and picturesque houses that
are a joy to the artist but the despair of the tenant. As
a wit once said, “ Looked at as a whole it is beautiful,
but looked at in bits it is a hole.” To Constantinople
have come many people and it has wound itself round
their hearts, and when they have gone away they have
been “ home-sick ” for it aU their days.

CHAPTER XI

The Greek Crusade into Anatolia and the
Awakening of the Turks

I FOUND that the Ottoman Empire was gone. In
some grotesque Arabian-Nights-like manner it
had been held together from the centre. The
Allies had destroyed it. Its centre lay defeated and
ruined. In its place there was nothing to offer but
the still-born folly of “ Self-Determination.” For the
time being the Allied garrisons were spread over all
like the fine cords of a net that held the rough broken
pieces together. But the cords began to slacken and
break, as the garrisons came in, and the new nations so
left found themselves surrounded by enemies and their
frontiers but raw wounds.

f All that remained to the Turks of the Ottoman Empire
' appeared pathetically inanimate, but by one ill-conceived
action the Conference in Paris stung it into new life.
On the 15th of May 1919, under the orders of the
Supreme Council, the Greeks landed troops at Smyrna
and took over that area.

The preliminaries to thk order showed clearly the
trend of events. They showed too the atmosphere
and conditions under which ihe Paris Conference worked.

81

G

82

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

In the hard years of the war secret treaties had been
made to win allies. Italy had been promised great
sections of Anatolia. Greece had been promised Western
Thrace. Russia had been promised Constantinople.
Much of the Middle East had been portioned out be-
tween England and France by the Sykes-Picot agree-
ment. Promises had been made to the Arabs and
the Christian minorities. By the time that peace arrived
the objects of the war had changed. America, the new
ally, had no part or lot in all these secret agreements
that held her allies. But they were always in the back-
ground. They were confused by local and national
hatreds and ambitions. They were complicated by
the fact that many of them were contradictory, and by
the declaration that ‘‘ self-determination was to
decide the future.

The Italians had failed to get any support for their
policy of annexation of South-Western Anatolia. The
French and British would not stand by the promises
they had made to the Italians at St. Jean de Maurienne
in 1917, but they could not deny that they had made
them. Feeling that facts were better than arguments,
the Italians landed and set to work. Very rapidly,
with troops and schools and traders, they had established
themselves in the south of Anatolia and were rapidly
nearing Smyrna. The Greek delegation in Paris strove
for its claims in Anatolia, and especially for Smyrna.
The French and British heard them with considerable
sympathy. The American advisers refused to agree.
They saw that Anatolia as a whole needed Smyrna as
its window and door on to the world. Special com-

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 83

mittees could come to no agreement, and the Italians
and the Greeks were at every point at variance.

Suddenly events took a dramatic turn. Signor
Orlando and President Wilson quarrelled in Paris over
Fiume. The former, with all the Italians, left the
Conference. There -was always in Paris a strong pro-
Hellenic party, which now played its cards skilfully.
M. Venizelos presented a sheaf of telegrams to show
that the Turks were massacring in the Smyrna area,
which was untrue. His subordinates produced excel-
lent, but incorrect, maps to show the preponderance
of the Greek population in and round Smyrna. The
Great Three did not wish to see the Italians in pos-
session, and they thought it an excellent method of
calling Signor Orlando back to heel. He came, but too
late, for already the order had been deliberately given
by Mr. Wilson without reference to his advisers, and
by Mr. Lloyd George and M. Clemenceau ; and the
Greeks were sent to Smyrna, not as a punishment to
the Turks, but as a counterpoise to the Italians.

From this small spark arose a fierce conflagration.
The Greeks came under the escort of Allied ships,
and their occupation was annoimced to the Governor of
Smyrna as that of the Allies. They began to massacre
as soon as they landed. The ofiicers and men of the
British battleship moored close to the quay were ordered
to remain inactive, while, within a few yards of their
stem, Greek troops committed murder and foul bmtalities.
It is said that so difficult was it to prevent the British
sailors from interfering that they were all ordered below
decks.

84 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

From Smyrna the Greeks pushed out, massacriag,
burning, pillaging and raping as they went, in the ordinary
manner of the Balkan peoples at war. Before them
the Turks fled, till the country-side was full of refugees.
Having extended beyond the line allowed to them, but
having given themselves sufficient room to protect
Smyrna, the Greeks sat down to consolidate.

Throughout Turkey awoke a new spirit, the spirit of a
Turkish Nation. Once before the Turks had tried to
turn their vast heterogeneous empire into a nation.
In 1908 the Young Turks had overthrown the tyranny
of Abdul Hamid and proclaimed a constitution with
equal rights for all. They had set to work to turkijy
the Empire. The result had been misfortune. The
Great Powers had at once reached out greedy hands for
spoils. Austria had seized Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Aided by Russia, Bulgaria had declared itself indepen-
dent. The Italians had seized Tripoli and Bengazi.
England and France had riveted tighter their economic
chains.

The Ottoman Christians refused to become Turks,
and in a fury at their disloyalty the Young Turks re-
sorted to the policy of their predecessor, and by fierce
massacre endeavoured to cut out of their body politic
the cancer that ate their flesh. Their enemies saw their
weakness, and then came the Balkan wars, and then
finally the Great World War that had brought destruction
and ruin. But the idea of a Nation had remained with
them, of one loyalty, of one religion, of one blood, and of
one tongue. They had been stripped of the vast territories
that they held by force alone. They had ceased to be

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 85

ambitious to become a power in Europe, and their hopes
were centred in Asia. Pared and pruned till little super-
fluous growth remained, the trunk of the Ottoman Empire
appeared dead. The sap moved but little.

. Now at the threat of final destruction the Turks woke
from the dull apathy of defeat. They were to be wiped
out. It was proposed to make a great Armenia behind
them and perhaps a Greek Pontus State on one flank.
There was the red danger of Smyrna in front of them,
and the Great Powers were planning to control what was
left. As had happened before in their history, in the
hour of real disaster, the call went out and slowly the
Turks roused themselves. A fierce vitality returned
and they set about to save themselves from complete
annihilation.

There were dull muttered threats at first. The 9th
Caucasian Army stopped disarming. At Erzerum, at
Konia and before Smyrna organized bodies came into
existence. The refugees were armed. The hills became
full of irregular bands that attacked the Greek troops.
The peasants were enrolled. The Christians had
already surrendered their arms at the orders of the Allies,
but the Turks found arms in quantities and at once.
The disarmament of the Turkish forces had been
neglected by the Allied commanders. The ideas on the
subject were grotesque. One staff officer of high rank
was heard to say that it was unfair to disarm the Turks
without disarming the Greeks as well, and one officer
who commanded a detachment, when ordered to retire
from Anatolia, brought with him a receipt signed
by a Turkish general for the stores and ammunition

86 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

that he had handed over in considerable quantities.
5 In Constantinople the renowned sailor, Raouf Bey, both
officially and unofficially organized protest and resistance.
Meetings were addressed by priests and fanatics ; and
that at the Municipal buildings in Stambul on the
20th of May was opened by a fierce appeal from a Turkish
woman, one Halide Edeb Hanum, and was concluded
with a few words of encouragement from French officers
who were on the platform.

Far away in the wilds of Anatolia some form of organi-
zation began to show itself almost at once, and one
man, Mustapha Kemal, stood out and dominated the
situation. He was a capable staff officer of great energy,
and a hard, calculating man. He had shown his capacity
on many fronts. He had organized the guerrilla warfare
against the Italians in Tripoli. He had commanded
the gendarmery divisions in Gallipoli and held up the
Australian advance and had saved the Turks from
defeat. In Syria he had been given a poor handful
of men, and with these he had gamely tried to withstand
Allenby and to organize a new front at Aleppo. After
Enver and his colleagues had fled, Mustapha Kemal
had remained, and his influence among the troops and
the people was great.; He had been appointed as In-
spector-General of the northern section of Anatolia, and
there he went in March 1919. He left Constantinople
determined to organize some show of resistance. He
found little response among the tired people, who prayed
only for peace and for time to plough their fields. But
the landing of the Greeks, the threat of final destruction,
and the wave of hatred that ran through the country

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 87

gave him his chance. He seized it. Help and encourage-
ment came from Constantinople and from every side.
On the old framework of the Ottoman army he grafted
the hastily raised irregulars, and as it grew the force
was directed towards the Greeks.

As yet the Turks had worked with caution. They
showed their defiance in sullen disobedience to the
Allied Control officers. The efforts at resistance were
local and scattered and mainly effective in the danger
zones close to the Greeks, where the refugees organized
gladly. The leaders of the disaffection had crept away
back into the eastern and inaccessible parts of Anatolia,
to organize at Siwas and Erzerum. They expected that
at any minute the Allies would send troops and crush
them down.

If the movement was to be dealt with some immediate
action was needed. The British High Commissioner
wired repeatedly for permission to act. The Grand Vizier,
who believed that the strict carrying out of the Armistice
was the one hope of Turkey, became apprehensive and
asked leave to deal with the danger. But the Allied
Governments were feeling the anti-war reaction. They
were being bombarded with demands for demobilization
and retrenchment. They dared not involve themselves
in further commitments. They gave orders that no
steps were to be taken in the matter, which to them
appeared to be one between the Sultan and his subjects.
They refused to allow the Sultan enough troops or a
free hand to deal with the position. They made light
of the danger of the situation, and then turned to other
problems.

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TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Very soon the Turks began to realize that the Allies
would not, or could not, take steps against them, and
at the end of June they came out more boldly into the
open. Irregular troops with a backing of regulars con-
tinually harried the Greeks, and sometimes there were
fierce engagements. By July a clear-cut organization,
grouped round Mustapha Kemal at Erzerum, had come
into existence and the hitherto scattered and separate
centres of revolt were co-ordinated within it. It was
directed by capable brains. It was assisted by great
enthusiasm and great hatred. The army grew, and it
met with no opposition. The organization and the
military forces now began to move westwards, leaving
only sufficient troops to guard against aggression from
Armenia. They came to the railway at Angora in
December 1919, and, making the new head-quarters there,
they moved down the railway and took over the junction
of Eski-Shehir and the line to Konia. The British
had orders to avoid any complications and they retired
as the Turks advanced, so that by April 1920 the whole
of Anatolia, except the area round Smyrna held by the
Greeks, was in the hands of the “ Nationalists,” as the
Turks under Mustapha Kemal were now called. Be-
hind a screen of irregulars they organized, collected
money and formed an administration, j
As Mustapha Kemal became a power the government
in Constantinople lost in importance. All Turks were
united in protest at the landing of the Greeks. But
whereas the Sultan and Damad Ferid, the Grand Vizier,
believed that the salvation of Turkey lay in obedience
to the terms of the Armistice and so winning the con-

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 89

fidence and good-will of the Allies, Mustapha Kemal
believed not at all in the Allies. He saw that they had
decided to destroy Turkey. He believed that the
Turks could only save themselves by their own strong
right arms. He had already succeeded beyond his
wildest dreams. The Allies had done nothing against
him. The Greeks were tied to their area. Their
atrocities had filled him and his supporters with wild
rage, for they despised these Greeks as their late sub-
jects. They hated the Allies but little less for sending
them. When ordered to return to Constantinople
Mustapha Kemal had refused. Damad Ferid was a
fierce old man and he dismissed Mustapha Kemal from
the army. Personal hatred and pique became an element
in the quarrel. A breach opened between the govern-
ment in Constantinople and the administration in
Angora. Then Damad Ferid fell from power and the
Nationalists gained control of the Constantinople cabinet.
In turn they were ejected, and the Sultan and Damad
Ferid Pasha and their supporters, appealing in vain to
the Allies for help, set out to crush the “ rebels ” in
Anatolia. They employed Circassians to fight them,
under a certain Ahmed Anzavour. The breach was
complete, and henceforth Angora went its own way
from step to step until it proclaimed itself an independent
government, while the Constantinople government,
tied hand and foot by the Allies, sank to the position
of the borough council of Stambul, and the Allied
cqntrol became valueless, y
* Finally, feeling their strength and showing the fortitude
and courage that more than once in their history saved

90 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

them from destruction, the Turkish Nationalists had on
the 28th of January 1920 published their National
Pact. They proclaimed the objects for which they
fought and swore that even to annihilation they would
strive till they possessed Anatolia, Constantinople and
Eastern Thrace, free of foreign interference. } It was
the declaration of the death of the Ottoman Empire,
and of the existence of the Turkish Nation. The birth
and rapid growth of this had been ignored by the Allies.
Now it stood out aggressively, asserting its claims and
its power to enforce them.

The success of the Turkish Nationalists, due as it
was to the sudden and unexpected vitality that they
had shown, was aided by a complicated mass of other
circumstances.

The Greeks had hardly landed before they encountered
Italian opposition. As the Greeks pushed out, the
Italians continued to advance, until they met as rivals.
At one point, on the 2nd of June 1919, their troops
opened fire on each other at the village of Cherkes Keuy,
and only with great tact was an open breach between
Rome and Athens avoided. The Italians, piqued and
disappointed, encouraged the spirit of Turkish revolt.
Too late they realized that they fanned a fire that would
singe their own beards. Before the rising conflagration,
which they had helped to light, they retired. There were
serious domestic troubles in Italy. The people demanded
demobilization and threatened revolution. Rather than
be involved in fighting the Italian Government with-
drew, and gave, up the territory on which they had set
their hearts. But as they went they sold their arms

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 91

and equipment to the Turk, and for many months they
were- his main source of supply for war material.

. Aided thus in the south, the Turks found other helpers
in the north. As the Bolsheviks slowly advanced,
steadily pushing the armies of counter-revolution under
Denikin before them, the British troops retired out of
the Caspian and across the Caucasus. Their retreat
encouraged the Turks, who received from Moscow
welcome messages and more welcome money. The
Allies were their common enemies. |

‘The Turkish Nationalists directed their energies
primarily against the Greeks, but the Greeks were the
agents of the Peace Conference, and rapidly the hostility
of the Turks was directed against the Allies.- Until it
had forced itself upon their attention, the Nationalist
movement was viewed with little interest and no hostility
by the Supreme Council, despite the constant telegrams
of warning from the High Commissioner and the
admonitions of the General Officer Commanding-in-
Chief.

When late in 1919 the position was recognized, the
jealousies between the Allies prevented any effective
action.' The Italians were already at loggerheads with
the Greeks and helping the Turks. Compromise
between the many conflicting ambitions was the only
hope of common action. The British were often
stubborn and their subordinates were sometimes unwise,
but as a whole they were prepared to sacrifice much to
maintain the Entente. From the first days of the
Armistice, however, the French were suspicious. They
believed that they were to be cheated of the good things

92

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

of victory. There was no common enemy in the Near
East, and there remained only the debris of dead systems,
out of which much of value might be extracted. They
found the British already in possession. They were
determined not to be jockeyed out. For two centuries
or more the British and the French had been rivals. In
the face of a common foe, for a brief period, they had
combined to crush the upstart Germany, and then in
1918 they took up again their ancient quarrel where they
had laid it down in 1913. In the Near East the Great
War, which was to have been an ending, became no
more than a brief interlude in the long struggle between
the rivals for the hegemony of Turkey.

Within a week of the signing of the Armistice the
French were issuing nationalization papers to enemy
subjects who possessed business or property interests
in Turkey, and so endeavoured to annex the trade.
Monsieur de France, the High Commissioner, and
Franchet dTsperey, the Allied General Officer
Commanding-in- Chief, were openly anti-British. They
assisted the enemy. Thus the Allied High Com-
missioners refused passports to the family of Enver
Pasha. The French supplied them. The High Com-
missioners ordered the arrest of Djavid the Salonika
Jew, the Minister of Finance to the Committee of Union
and Progress. The French smuggled him into France.
In May 1919, French officers spoke at public meetings
against the Greek landing in Smyrna and encouraged
Turkish resistance. As early as June 1919, M. Pichon
was in private correspondence with the Prince Heritier,
and had promised him assistance to gain Turkish aspira-

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 93

tions. The Moniteur, the Stambul and other papers
were subsidized with French money to publish anti-
British articles. Major Labonne, the French repre-
sentative at Afion-Kara-Hissar, Colonel Mongin at
Angora, and General Bath 616 my, the French Mili tary
Attach^ in Constantinople, were openly with the
Turks.

For a short while the French used the Greeks. Even
as late as June 1920 they advised them to advance, so
as to get the Turks off the railway. Then they threw
them over. As it became evident that the English had
taken the Greeks under their protection, so, to neutralize
this, the French became Turkophile, and in October

1921 M. Franklin Bouillon on behalf of the French
Government made a secret treaty at Angora. That
treaty was dishonourable not so much in its terms as
in the secrecy with which it was made. The French
supplied the Turks with information as to the Greek
forces and our own. The culmination was the great
betrayal at Chanak, when on the 22nd of September

1922 they withdrew and left the British alone to face
the oncoming Turks.

These are only a few of the countless similar incidents,
but they showed the blind folly that made the Entente
in the Near East a delusion. In France suspicion died
slowly. England, despite the Entente, still appeared as
the cunning monster which had stolen its colonial empire
from the French. Sound public opinion throughout
England was only too eager to forget the ancient rivalry
and to allow France to attain her just aspirations. It
realized that Allied solidarity was the one hope of sal-

94

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

vation for ruined Europe, but it met with little response ;
and from the end of 1919 onwards the Entente split until
the French gradually whole-heartedly backed the Turks,
and the British half-heartedly backed the Greeks.

The Greeks were from the beginning in a bad position.
They strained for greatness. Their resources were
meagre and their ambitions great. They set out on a
crusade backed by the Allies. But as soon as they left
the seashore they found themselves in a barren wild
country, and were deserted by the Allies and eventually
warned that they must evacuate. They endeavoured to
annex lands to which they had no rights except those
of force, while on the other hand they were opposed
by a people fighting desperately for their homes.

They played, moreover, at being the champions of their
oppressed fellow-countrymen in Anatolia, but this was
but a fancied r61e. I remember well an incident that
aptly illustrated this. One day, M. Canelopoulos came
to the Embassy.

“ I hope,” said the High Commissioner, that your
Excellency’s troops will advance no further into Anatolia,
for, if they do, I fear that all the Christians may be
murdered.”

“ I hope,” replied M. Canelopoulos, that the
massacres begin soon, for we have need of a raison
d^etre for advancing.” And I could only think of the
incident a few weeks before when, in fear of the Turkish
irregulars, the Greek population had flocked out of the
village of Aidin behind Smyrna to follow the retreating
Greek troops to safety, and how the Commanding Officer
had driven them back knowing that they would be

GREEK CRUSADE INTO ANATOLIA 95

massacred because “ he needed a raison d'itre for advanc-
ing into and beyond Aidin.”

At home the Greeks were unstable. They grew tired
of war and the suppression of their liberty. In November,
1919, M. Venizelos warned the Supreme Council that
Greece could not continue to keep up a huge army to
police Smyrna. The Greeks were in the unfortunate
position of the man who put one finger into a sausage-
machine and then when he wished to withdraw he could
not and had to go through and become a sausage al-
together.

j Aided by the dissensions of the Allies, by their pre-
occupation and by their inability to take military action,
the Turks succeeded. They found many Allies. Central
Asia with Bokhara, Samarkand and Afghanistan was
prepared to be troublesome. The British retreat out
of the Caspian, their withdrawal in Anatolia, their
inability to act in Persia and their weakness in India
encouraged many to break out. The Kurds were angry
at the idea of an Armenian State, and in June 1919 they
became a menace to Irak. The Tartars of Nachivan
and the Emir Feisal and the Arabs were disgruntled. In
all directions were potential allies and Mustapha Kemal
with uncommon skill roused dissatisfaction, raised the
hopes of resistance or of advantages to be gained, and
turned all the eyes of the dissatisfied towards Angora.|
The Turkish nation was facing a Christian crusade. It
became itself the forefront of a crusade and behind it
muttered and growled all Asia ready for revolt.

CHAPTER XII

The Pleasant Life of Constantinople and
the Signs of Danger

F or the minute there was a lull, and only in the
distance came the dull mutterings of the gather-
ing storm. Constantinople had ceased to be the
heart of a great empire, but by its geographical and its
religious position it remained the centre of a complicated
web. Sitting there in the centre we could feel the
storm as it rose and its first faint tremors shook each
strand of the web. From far out in Central Asia, from
the Balkans, from Russia and the Caucasus, from Arabia
and Anatolia came reports of danger. The British High
Commissioner sent out repeated warnings, but the
Great Four in Paris ignored them. They thundered
out their orders to the World as if they were gods, but
there was no bolt with the thunder, and it was but
empty rumbling.

Of weakness there had been warnings enough. Italian
troops had mutinied when ordered to Albania. French
sailors had mutinied in the Black Sea. British soldiers
had marched up to the War Office in Whitehall to
protest against the slowness of demobilization. The
Great Four gave their orders, but they had no power

96

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 97

left to enforce them. This fact the East was gradually
realizing.

In December 1919 the French had taken over Syria
and Cilicia. The Allies were retiring gracefully out of
Anatolia, without incidents. The Greeks appeared
firmly established round Smyrna. The Nationalists were
constantly reported to be growing strong, but beyond
irregulars and guerrilla fighters they had shown little
real strength.

For the time being Constantinople was untroubled.
The Allies had come to the city in victory. The
Christians and even the Turks had welcomed them with
joy. They came as deliverers and they came "with their
pockets stuffed with good money. They spent it
liberally. They were in the “ care-free ” state that
characterized the early months of the Armistice. The
cafes, restaurants and dancing-halls, that had catered
for the Germans, now catered for them, and the black-
eyed Greek and Armenian girls, who had been kind to
“ Fritz,” were now lavish in their attentions to the
British and French soldiers. They lived as liberators,
heroes and victors among a friendly population, and they
paid their way without undue argument. Their admirers
put away carefully their fezes, which were wrapped up
in tissue paper against the future, and bought hats and
account-books in honour of the allies and as a sign that
the Turks were no more.

Life was gay and wicked and delightful. The cafes
were full of drinking and dancing. There was none of
the clogging drag of home ties. It was good to go to
the Tokatlian Hotel and hear the renowned Tzigane

H

98 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

orchestra play its sighing gipsy songs and to catch the
eyes of pretty girls and to dance with them between the
tables. It was good when it was hot to stroll into the
garden of the Petits Champs des Morts, while the night
hid the refuse in the grave-yard below, and watch the
cheap artists on the stage and drink black coffee and
discuss the crowd that sauntered by under the lime
trees, and bandy jokes in broken French with the demu
mondaines^ and play at being a millionaire.

It was good to take ship and sail away between the
islands of the Marmora to bathe in cool coves or up the
Bosphorus, from the terrace of some palace, to dive into
the swift stream and battle with it. Houses and cars
and motor boats were there for the asking, for the army
supplied them out of its liberal purse or by requisition.
Every one expected the occupation to last only a few
months, and they revelled while they had the opportunity
and the money. For myself I did not unpack for the
first six months, thinking that the end must come soon,

There were quaint forbidden tea-parties in Chichli,
the suburb of Pera, to which came Turkish ladies just
reaching out to grasp their new found liberty. They
encouraged me to talk my broken Turkish. They cooed
and complimented me on a fluency that I did not possess,
until I grew hot and awkward and my field-boots seemed
long and my spurs caught in the fringes of the ridiculous
furniture. Their rooms were arranged in Victorian
fashion with hard straight chairs and useless tables and
pictures in shell frames and fans and feathers. When
we had talked of the weather and my extensive knowledge
of Turkish, there was little left to be said. In cool rooms

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 99

that shut out the dusty streets and the blazing sun they
sat with folded hands. As was the girl I had seen long
ago in the office of the Governor of Stambul that day I
came from the prison, they were dainty, exquisite and
scented. Their eyes were black and deep, their skins
white as alabaster and where it stretched over bones the
blue veins showed through. They were aristocratic and
courteous, but incredibly dull, except that sometimes a
topic would touch politics or war or the Nationalists,
and then their bodies would stiffen and the languid depth
would go out of their eyes and they would be alive ;
for they love and hate well and are fierce, cruel and
fanatical patriots.

The old order and the harems were gone. Economic
considerations had destroyed them. “ In the old days,”
said one dame, “ there were palaces and gardens and
slaves and servants and these things might have been,
but how can my husband expect to shut me up in a two-
roomed flat ? ” At tea-parties they were stiff and
formal, but under other circumstances one learnt more
of them.

As often, though it was forbidden, I rowed myself
down one June evening from the summer Embassy,
that is on the cool hills just below the Black Sea, to the
terrace garden of some Turkish friends. Their
hospitality was extensive, and evening changed to night
with pale stars striving with the saffron of the sunset.
One by one came rowing boats and from them landed
Turkish ladies, girls and old women, who talked awhile
under the veil of the gloaming and then went elsewhere.
They said shameless open things to each other and to

lOO

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

me, and they laughed softly together. They were
frankly sexual. But before their men they are reserved,
for the Turks are eaten up with a wild jealousy that has
no basis in their religion, but is animal and natural.
They are infuriated at the sight of their women with a
foreigner, as we British are.

It was late when I rose to go, and two girls volunteered
to row me back upstream. They sculled well. The
party saw us to the steps of the terrace with all the old-
world courtesy that might have been for a Pasha. A
yellow moon, warm from the day, had crept across the
sky. The villages were all asleep. Across the stream a
mile away the hills of Asia were silhouetted against the
sky and on the shores the shadow was deep, rich-coloured
and deep as a bowl of wine. A motor boat of an allied
general raced by without lights. The waves slapped us
softly and went in long ripples to lap and break among the
broken terraces on the shore.

Suddenly from a balcony came the sound of a harp.
It was Madame Sabline, a great lady of the late Czar’s
court, who had escaped out of the terror of Russia, who
played. Each note, each run, the melody came in
exquisite perfection soft and clear to us across the moon-
lit water and in the silence broken only by the sound of
distant dogs barking and the creak of some wood ship
at anchor. The two girls whispered to each other and
rowed again and laughed together, and their laughter
was as soft as the bubbles that sang against the boat as
we cut our way forward.

But between them and me a great gulf was fixed. We
had nothing in common. The music, the moon, the

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE loi

beauty meant other things to them. I could see the
shimmer of their long white silk gowns as their bodies,
ripe and supple, swung as they rowed. White silk scarfs
were over their hair and wound round their necks so
that they seemed like hoods. In the half light their
eyes looked out black and alluring and enticing. I was
caught by a subtle attraction, by curiosity, by the lure
for the forbidden and the unknown, by the pulse and
tingle of desire. I was dealing with unknown worlds in
shadows. Behind them seemed mystery and the East.
Yet in the moonlight their skins gleamed as white as
any Saxon’s. As they spoke there was none of the
harsh gutturals of the Arab. The scent of them was
the scent of powdered Paris, and not the greasy odours
of the East. Yet, except desire, between us there was
nothing in common, neither religion nor language, nor
habits nor morals.

I found the Greeks and Armenians liberal in their
favours. Their soirees and tea-parties were gay. They
chattered in the ugly French of Pera or in pidgin English
and broke off at times into their own hoarse languages.
They were full of clumsy subtleties and crude doubU-
entendres. Spoken with every conceivable accent the
word “ shocking ” appeared to be the dominant feature
of their lives. Even at their pleasantest they were
irritating. They had an ulterior motive of gain in every
action. They irritated because they aped the European.
They played at being of the West and civilized, but
between &em and the European was a gulf as wide as
that between the Turk and the British, and it had no
subtlety or charm or mystery to hide it.

102

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The life was full of intrigues and counter-intrigues.
All the complications that had formed the varied texture
of Ottoman rule remained. Religions and creeds strove
one with another. The European Powers struggled to
get a privileged hold and oust their rivals. All the
countless peoples of the city worked for different ends,
and the old control was gone. The old system of
Government and the regular routine of bribery had
disappeared, and no central policy or power dominated
the situation.

We had strict orders to avoid all complications, but,
strive and struggle as it might, the Embassy became
often enmeshed sometimes in some new quarrel and
sometimes in some rivalry centuries old. It was in a
false position. Its hands were tied. A thousand con-
structive and active decisions were required. It was
ordered to be negative and inactive. The simplest
problem would be found to be complicated. It would,
for example, contain questions affecting Italian amour
propre, special French capitulation rights, aspirations of
the Armenians and the Arabs, and American trading
rights ; and there was no government or power to over-
ride or co-ordinate these and settle the problem. Out-
side events affected the situation each hour. A Bolshevik
success, a riot in India, the formation of an American
trade corporation, materially influenced each issue. We
were lost in the vast muddle of trade, religion and politics
that made an unholy tangle.

Many of the intrigues were parts of mere political and
local fracas, but some had world-wide significance. For
close on sixteen centuries there had been a battle royal

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 103

between the Pope and the Patriarch and the centuries
had not reduced its virulence. The quarrel began with
the transfer of the imperial capital from Rome to
Constantinople by Constantine in 330 a.d. As the
rivalry between the capitals of Old and New Rome
increased that between the prelates kept pace, for the
bishop of Constantinople aspired to equality with the
bishop of Rome. It grew bitter in the eleventh century
and culminated in the excommunication of the Patriarch
Cerularius when at 9 a.m. on the morning of the i6th
of July, 1054, the papal legates laid the bull of excom-
munication on the altar of St. Sophia. That marked
one of the great points in the world’s history, for on that
date the Eastern church and the By2antine political
system broke away from the West. The quarrel was
embittered and the hope of reconciliation was destroyed
by the crusades and especially the fourth and most
scandalous crusade. Mohammed the Conqueror found it
to his advantage, for the citizens of Constantinople were
bitter against the Pope of Rome and refused all help.
He and his successors used it as a lever against Christian
Europe and the Patriarchate became a department of the
Ottoman Empire. For a while, submerged below the
Ottoman rule, the quarrel died down. It flared up again
at the Armistice in 1918. Greece was among the victors.
She dreamed of a Greater Greece and of herself as the
heir to Byzantium as well as to the Old Greece. The
Allies encouraged her. As she grew, so the Patriarch
increased in importance and had the dream been realized
the Greek Patriarch in Constantinople, surrounded by
a growing Greek Empire and looked to by the ruined

104

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

churches of Russia and Bulgaria, would have been a
worthy rival to the Pope.

That dream was broken, but the old quarrel took a
new shape ; for the Archbishop of Canterbury began
an extensive flirtation with the Patriarch. He persuaded
the Patriarch Meletios to recognize the orders of the
Anglican church. There was much rejoicing in the
Church of England, but the Archbishop never realized
that for his part he was expected to produce not fine
words about spiritual reunion, but horses and men and
guns. In the failure of the Allies came ruin to the
Patriarch.

For myself I found the greatest problem was to arrive
at the facts and the truth of any subject. Facts, as we
understand them, did not exist. For an example, to
us the figure “ 2 ” represents a definite entity. In
Turkey it was a hazy outline and wandered down to
zero on one side and up to a thousand on the other.
The art of lying had been carried to such a finish as to
complicate life unduly. With us lying is a luxury for
which we have to pay dearly, but in Turkey it was a
necessity of life. Ever3rthing said by anyone was auto-
matically a lie, and the lie was no simple, straightforward
lie but a complicated affair sometimes with an object,
often based on a substratum of truth, but just as often
it was a matter of habit. Life was spent in doing mental
addition or subtraction sums and guessing at the answers.

That subterranean mentality was the essential part
of the life, and it was aptly illustrated by the history of
a friend of mine. He was a Scotchman and over fond
of power. He was also a friend of Damad Ferid Pasha,

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE f 105

the Sultan’s brother-in-law and the Grand Vizier, and
he advised him. The Grand Vizier believed that this
gentleman was an official agent of the High Commissioner.
Admiral Sir John de Robeck and Mr. Ryan, his Drago-
man, explicitly and repeatedly informed Damad Ferid
that we had no such agent, but he persisted and following
the advice that he received from the Scotchman he did
many stupid things and then felt aggrieved because the
British Government refused to support him. Eventually
after a heavy luncheon and over a cup of coffee in his
palace on the Bosphorus I ventured as a friend to mention
the same fact to Damad Ferid. He pondered for a
while and then he said,

“ Then why did this gentleman meddle in politics ? ”
and I replied,

“But His Excellency, the High Commissioner, has
often warned Your Highness. Why would you not
believe him ? ”

Then he pondered again for a while, and he said,

“ The greater the man, the greater the liar.”

Like animals that are soft and unprotected, the
Christians of Turkey have a subtle extra sense of danger
at a distance. Before the end of 1919 they realized
that the position was changing. The soirees grew less
in number and fezes began to reappear in the streets
of Pera. The run on Homburg hats was over.

Moreover, Constantinople was not showing itself duly
responsive to the vaunted civilized rule of the Allies.
Trade was stagnant. The money-changers misused the
market at their pleasure. Prices had bounded up
unchecked and profiteering was general. The streets

io6 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

of the city were dirtier than before. There was more
open immorality and blatant drunkenness than in the
days of the Turks. There was less justice, and that
only rough justice dished out by inexperienced officers.
The Capitulations had been extended to all the Allies
and half the city paid no taxes, so that the municipal
services had no means with which to do their work.
Indiscriminate requisitions far in excess of the military
requirements of the force had annoyed the householders
and the well-to-do of all creeds. There was little or
nothing that the Allies could point to with pride, and
already the people of Constantinople sighed for the
efficient Germans.

As ever, while the Christians lived in terror, the Turks
sat placid and unmoved, waiting what should come. I
wandered in the Oriental quarters of Stambul and down
by the palace and the village of Beshik Tash. The men
lounged and smoked in the open in front of the caf^s or
squatted in their shops. Their houses were blind with
all the windows covered with lattices and the doors
closed and no sign of life or movement. The houses
were dumb and blind but behind the lattices were women
watching and now and again, as I passed, I heard a little
laugh or a quick drawn-in whispering. In the Christian
quarters men in shirt-sleeves and women with frowzy
hair and frowzier clothes leaned out of the upper windows
the live-long day. All the lower windows were guarded
by strong bars and the street doors were of heavy iron.
I visited many houses and rang clanging cracked bells.
Some one would inspect me through a grating, and when
I had stated my name, nationality and business, the

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 107

information was called to the upper stories by shrill,
unmusical voices. Then with the clanking of r.bgina
and grinding of locks the door would be opened a little
and closed again as soon as I was within. Such, even
when the Allies were in occupation and the danger
was but distant, was the fear that lay heavy on this city.

Outside the life of the town, bringing their own ways
of life and their own gaiety, came Russian refugees
by the tens of thousands, aristocrats of the old regime
and bourgeoisie of all sorts and kinds. As long as
they had money they lived gaily and then they were
absorbed among the beggars or the restaurants or into
other countries. The men of all classes did little to
earn respect. The women, whether the grand dames
from the court or the dancers of the Imperial ballet or
the wives of merchants or even the demi-rrumdaines,
had an unrivalled charm. They had all the delicacy,
breeding and taste that the life of Europe and its education
can give. They had all the placid fatalistic acceptance
of facts that marks the Eastern. They had none of the
hard calculating mind of the Englishwoman which even
when she has given her heart still goes on doing sums
of “ worth while.” They had a brilliance and a culture
that crowded out the dullness of the Turkish ladies.
They had a charm and breeding that showed polished
beside the rude strainings of the local Christians. They
were not immoral for they were non-moral.

“ Vous serez toujours fidMe ? ” said an enamoured
British officer.

“ Ah ! oui I jusqua la derni^re fois,” replied his
Russian dame.

io8 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

They were irresponsible in their decisions. They
enjoyed the good things of life to the maximum and
without regret. When evil came, they faced it placidly.
They swept into the life of Constantinople until every
wife, whether Turk or English or Greek, learned to hate
them.

In the excitement of the political intrigues, in watching
the play of forces, in bathing and picnics in the rich
sun, in exploring in twisted alleys and ancient ham
and the vaults below Stambul and the great mosques,
I found time passed rapidly.

Suddenly the first buffets of the threatening storm
struck our web and shook it from end to end. ‘By the
loth of December 1919, the British had evacuated Syria
and Cilicia, and the French, as always, still believing
that they had somehow been tricked and misled, had
taken over. They commenced to arm the local Armenians
and to enlist them. Without hesitation the Nationalist
Turks struck. They attacked the French at Marash
and after a siege drove them out and besieged the garrison
in Urfa, which made terms to be allowed to retire un-
molested, but in the open country they were treacherously
attacked and forced to surrender. The “ National Pact ”
was proclaimed and signed by the members of the
Ottoman Parliament which still sat in Constantinople.
In the city, the Ministry of War and all departments
began openly to work for the Nationalists and to send
them arms and money and men. Any orders issued,
or representations made, by the Allies were ignored, and
marked hostility and disrespect were shown. A
Nationalist Government was in power. On the 27th

PLEASANT LIFE OF CONSTANTINOPLE 109

of January a dump of arms under a French guard in the
Gallipoli peninsula was raided and cleared. Throughout
Cilicia and in parts of Anatolia there were fierce massacres
of Armenians, and in the middle of February the
Bolsheviks captured Odessa and chased out the British
mission, the British battleships and a horde of refugees.
The threatened danger was on us.

CHAPTER XIII

The Treaty of Sevres. The Storm Bursts,

1920

I RRITATED by this show of resistance on the part
of a defeated enemy, the Allies decided to teach
the Turks a lesson. The British Commander,
General Sir George Milne, had some idea of the strength
of the Nationalists. The French from their Cilician
experiences had more. The Embassies had very little
and the Allied Premiers in Paris had no conception at
all of the situation that now faced them. They did
not realize that they were dealing with a live force and
not with the decrepit relics of the old Ottoman Empire.
Anatolia was not affected by an economic blockade, nor
did it care whether or not it was recognized as one
of the family of nations. It was only through Con-
stantinople that punishment could be inflicted, and it
was decided to occupy Constantinople officially on the
1 6th of March.

The occupation was to be carried out by Lieut.-
General Sir Henry Wilson as the Officer Commanding
the Allied troops of the area. The French and Italian
Governments signed the instructions. Their depart-
ments in Paris and Rome held up the executive orders.

110

THE TREATY OF S£VRES

III

The occupation was carried out, but by British sailors
and soldiers alone ; and only when the French and
Italians saw that it had been successful and that the
whole control of the city and area would be in British
hands, did they combine and claim a share in this con-
trol. Martial law was proclaimed. The life of the
city was to continue as before. The Ottoman Govern-
ment was allowed to work, but every branch was to
be carefully supervised. The Ministry of War, the
Admiralty, the customs, passports, ports, telegraphs and
newspapers were watched and controlled by Allied
officers. The Allied Police Commission already in
existence was strengthened, and the French had some
organization for the gendarmerie.

On the night prior to the occupation a number of
prominent Turks were arrested as active supporters of
the Nationalists. In the prisons there were already
many officials and officers, accused of participation in
massacres or ill-treatment of prisoners-of-war. They
were all shipped off at once and imprisoned in a camp
at Malta,’

The story of these deportees is a sorry one. Among
them were evil criminals, who had murdered prisoners-
of-war. Many were ordinary normal Turks who had
been leading men in Turkey during the war. Some
were arrested on the poor evidence of a couple of Arme-
nian women or on that of an enemy. More than one
was arrested in error. They were imprisoned in condi-
tions quite out of keeping with their rank or position.
They were kept two years in confinement without being
charged with any crime. They were herded all together,

II3

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

those arrested for political offences old and new, and
those for massacre, murder and evil crimes. Thus the
foul beast Mazlum Bey from Afion-Kara-Hissar, who
had murdered British prisoners-of-war and committed
loathsome crimes and offences, was confined with Said
Halim Pasha, the old Grand Vizier, who had opposed
the declaration of war and had been persuaded by
Enver Pasha against his better judgment to sign. It
was as if the victorious Germans had shut Lord Balfour
in with a gang of criminals like Crippen and Mahon.
As pressed continually on the Home Government the
matter could have been disposed of easily and well.
A court could have tried each case, hung the murderer,
sent the evil-doer to hard labour, released the innocent
and, if considered necessary, interned those politically
dangerous. But the affair dragged on, and late in 1921
all these prisoners without distinction were released,
and those who wished it were shipped back to Turkey.

The results of these deportations were considerable.
All Turks of military age began to leave for Anatolia,
and all men of any importance made for Angora. The
Sultan’s advisers were believed to have supplied many
of the names, and hatred against the Sultan increased.
The belief in British justice suffered a rude shock.
Many of the deportees were men of great importance.
When released tihey became ministers and deputies in
the Angora Government, and their hatred of the British
was not diminished by their imprisonment, degradation
and general treatment in Malta.

The deportations and the occupation of Constanti-
nople encouraged the Sultan and his supporters. Both

THE TREATY OF SEVRES

he and his brother-in-law Damad Ferid Pasha were
early convinced that Mustapha Kemal and the National-
ists were intent on forming a separate Government.
It is hard to say how far this attitude on their part
drove the Nationalists to separation, or how far the
Sultan and his supporters knew their own countrymen
well enough to realize that, if given a free hand, they
would take this line. The Sultan endeavoured to
involve us on his side. We struggled to keep clear,
for in February 1919 the High Commissioner had
received instructions to protect the Sultan, but to take
no action against any Turks who might come into power,
even if they were members of the old hostile Committee
of Union and Progress, and on no account to become
involved in local Turkish affairs.

Very soon the Sultan’s enemies became our enemies,
and, in acting in our defence, it was difficult to avoid
acting on his behalf. To those on the spot to stand
by the Sultan was clearly the soxmd policy. He repre-
sented the de jure Government. He was friendly, pre-
pared to carry out the Allies’ orders, and he was within
their control. British interests were few. We required
the Straits open, and fair play for our traders. We
needed the moral support of the Kdialif for our Moslem
subjects. There was on us a moral obligation to protect
the Christian minorities. In the early months of 1919
and in 1930, given moral support, a loan and a free
hand, the Sultan could have asserted himself and dealt
with the first efforts of Mustapha Kemal. The peasantry
were still loyal. They believed that they were enlisting
to save him. ;^He sent his Grand Vizier hot-foot to

1

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

114

the Embassies with warnings and requests to be allowed
to act. He was refused permission. He was tied hand
and foot and then called upon to carry out the Allies’
demands. As the power passed to the Nationalists, he
became valueless. He was an old man, living in con-
stant fear of assassination, and he was dominated by
his Grand Vizier.

Damad Ferid was of a far different type. He was a
stubborn, brave, unwise old man. He was an Albanian
with a touch of Kurdish blood in him, and he had all
the fierce hatred of the blood feud in his soul. He
was a clansman without compromise. Throughout he
had warned the British of the dangers and he had taken
what steps he could to destroy the Nationalists, until
the breach between Angora and Constantinople was
broad and unbridgeable. His personality counted for
much. His lack of compromise and his pursuit of his ven-
detta against his enemies made reconciliation impossible.

Faced by the same enemies, despite intentions to
the contrary, we found ourselves working with the
Sultan’s party. Undoubtedly a number of the deportees
were arrested at Damad Ferid’s request. Now threat-
ened by the Nationalists, we went a step farther. Sir
George Milne sent one of his staff, Colonel Shuttleworth,
to discuss with Zeki and Hamdi Pashas at the Ministry
of War the formation of two divisions of royalist troops
to be organized with British officers. As soon as these
were ready, they were to be taken by sea to the north
coast of Anatolia and marched in on the Nationalist
flank and rear.

. The Sultan bestirred himself. He issued an Imperial

THE TREATY OF SfiVEES

”5

Iradi proclaiming Mustapha Kemal and his associates
outlaws and a Fetwa which excommunicated them. He
dissolved the Ottoman Government, and recalled back
to power Damad Ferid, who had been forced to resign
some months before. He tried to raise the Kurds to
his aid. The Allies agreed and he arranged for arms
and stores to be sent from the depots under Allied control
to the Circassians fighting for him under Ahmed Anza-
vour. He sent troops to Yalova and Ismidt. Still the
Allies did not back him fully. Few of the arms and
stores reached the Circassians. The local officials held
them up and these officials were under Allied control.
Up to the end why we should not act together against
a common enemy to our mutual advantage was not
imderstood by the Sultan nor by Damad Ferid, nor yet
by any reasonable person in possession of the facts.

' The result of the Sultan’s actions was negligible, but
it drove the Nationalists to fury. They denounced the
Central Government. They swore vengeance on Damad
Ferid. They formed at Angora the Grand National
Assembly to carry on the government of the country,
as long as Constantinople was in bondage. They pre-
pared to fight to the end.

! Then the full storm burst on us with blow on crash-
ing blow. Hardly had the occupation been completed
before the Turks surrounded the British garrison at
Eski-Shehir. All other garrisons and Control Officers
had been withdrawn to avoid capture or arrest except
this one, and it had been left on the railway junction
to assist the retirement of Italian troops from Konia.
The garrison cut its way out, but lost a number of

ii6 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

men and animals. The Italians with their line of retreat
gone were forced to turn off at Afion-Kara-Hissar, and
escape by the Greek zone and Smyrna. In Europe
Germany showed signs of revolt, and a revolution in
favour of the Kaiser blazed up for a while. Ireland
was twisted in pain, and all the force of England was
concentrated in holding her down. The Kurds were
rising on the Mesopotamian frontier. Behind us in
Eastern Thrace a certain Jaffar Tahir had raised the Turks,
and they were arming and drilling and organizing from
Adrianople.

Infuriated at the attitude of the . Sultan, Mustapha
Kemal and the new Government at Angora proceeded
forthwith to make a military convention with the Bol-
shevik Government of Moscow. Denikin and his
counter-revolutionary troops had been smashed. They
had shown neither efficiency nor honesty. The Turks
and the Bolsheviks had a common aim in the destruction
of the British Empire, their common enemy. They
struck at her feet in the East. The Bolsheviks seized
Azerbaijan. By a concentrated action with the Turks
from the south they forced Armenia to her knees, and
captured Kars and Nakhitchevan. Now Nakhitchevan
and Kars form the back door of Anatolia and a side
door to Persia, and are on the way to Mesopotamia.
The Allied general staffs became alarmed. They pre-
pared plans to stop the Russian advance southwards.
They feared Bolshevik propaganda on the heels of
victorious troops. The British discussed the safety of
Bagdad and Jerusalem and even produced schemes to
cover the Suez Canal.

THE TEEATY OF SFVRES

1 17

The Sultan’s troops, sent to Yalova and Adabazar,
refused to fight in the civil war. Those under Ahmed
Anzavour were driven back, and wiped out, and he
was himself killed.

In May the terms of the Treaty of Sfevres were pub-
lished. President Wilson and the Americans had left
the Conference in December 1919, and with them they
took all their idealism. The Peace Conference reverted
to old European methods and diplomacy. The secret
treaties of the war, that had hovered behind the Con-
ference like pale ghosts, afraid of the light from America,
now came forward. The march of events had at last
warned the Allies and they set to work to be finished
with Turkey. The result was the Treaty of Sevres.

It was based and bound on the secret treaties. Italy
and Greece, before they entered the war with the Allies,
had bargained for their prices and had been promised
sections of Anatolia as payment. France had her
aspirations, and England her policies. They were all
fitted into the treaty. Annexation of territory was con-
cealed behind the American idea of “ mandates.” Syria
and Cilicia went to France. Sm3rma and Western
Thrace and most of Eastern Thrace to Greece. Italy
got the islands. Russia had been promised Constanti-
nople and the area of the Straits and the Bosphorus.
But she was out of the running and they were put under
an international regime with the Greeks down the
western shore of the Marmora and on the Gallipoli
peninsula.

The Turks, with Smyrna cut out, were to have
Anatolia as far as the Georgian, Armenian, Kurdish,

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

ii8

and Mesopotamian frontiers, but every detail of their
lives was to be supervised. There were Commissions
and Sub-Commissions. There was the Sub-Commission
of Organization to disband the Turkish army and to
form the new forces of a limited volunteer army and
gendarmerie. There was a Sub-Commission to look
after custom officials, forest guards and urban and rural
police. Nominal sovereign rights were left to the
Turks, but they were bound hand and foot with rigid
irons. Their finances were strictly controlled.

Attached to the treaty, and not made public until
Damad Ferid had signed, was a tripartite agreement
between England, France and Italy, It divided Anatolia
into three pieces. In the Southern portion the “ special
interests of Italy were recognized.” In the Eastern
section “ the special interests of France were recog-
nized.” The remaining portion was not allotted, but
it was presumed that England would have “ special
interests ” there. Beyond this all the sections of the
old Ottoman Empire were portioned off to Arabs and
Kurds and Jews.

It was incredible that under the conditions in existence
at that moment such a treaty could have been proposed.
The Ottoman Empire was dead, and so far as the treaty
marked that fact it was of value ; but it took no stock
of the new forces, of the weakness of the Allies and
the strength of the enemy. Compromises undoubtedly
made it unreal. Those who framed it must have been
completely ignorant of the position of affairs, and their
advisers woefully ignorant of geography and ethnology.
I was amazed at the attitude of some of the advisers.

THE TREATY OF SJTVRES

119

On his way to Paris, one sat in my oflSce and blandly
discussed whether Proportional Representation rather
than the Majority Electoral System had better be
included in the constitution of the Kurdish state, about
to be framed ; and for some time it was seriously con-
sidered giving the mandate of the Jewish home in
Palestine to the Arab King of the Hedjaz. The treaty
was grossly immoral. This portioning out of the home-
lands of a people into sections like slabs of bread to
be devoured by various powers has, throughout modem
history, been considered immoral. Moreover, by its
‘‘ spheres of interest ” it perpetrated the ancient rivalry
between the nations in Turkey.

The publication of the terms had an instantaneous
effect. All Turks realized that it meant their destmc-
tion. The sea-shore was to be taken from them, and
they were to be confined to central Anatolia. A hostile
Armenia was to be formed in their rear, and they were
to be chained hand and foot by controls. Their attitude
stiffened. They were now to fight not the Greeks alone,
but all the Allies, to save themselves from annihilation.
They at once attacked and captured the French garrison
in Bozanti, and the French Government was glad to
come to terms and sign an armistice with them.

^The Turks set their teeth and reorganized. They
smashed what was left of the Sultan’s troops and finished
the civil war. All dissensions and quarrels among them
disappeared. The Eastern troops were put under
Kiazim Kara Bekir and the Western under Ali Fuad
Pasha with the central supreme command of Mustapha
Kemal at Angora. Now all parties, except the immediate

120

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

entourage of the Sultan, combined in the struggle to
save their country, and every Turk worth his salt became
a Nationalist.

It was a fight to the finish. They closed in on the
Allies in Constantinople. They attacked the French
battalion that protected the coal mines at Zangulduk
and this was at once withdrawn. The last few troops
of the Italians scampered out of Anatolia to avoid
destruction.

The Bolsheviks had pushed in across the Caucasus
and, to avoid contact, as ordered by the War Ofiice
the British retired and so evacuated Batum and all the
Caucasus. This left the flank of Wrangel’s anti-revolu-
tionary army exposed. The Bolsheviks had swung into
northern Persia and with their coming the treaty signed
between England and Persia on the 9th of August, 19191
and all the structure that was built on it, collapsed.

That treaty is worthy of a passing notice, for it aptly
illustrates, from Persia, much that led to the failxife in
Turkey. It was a treaty made in haste and secrecy
and only published when signed. It was done under
the supervision of Lord Curzon, who as a distinguished
amateur diplomatist had had an exceptional record of
failure. It was made against the advice of many great
experts, such as Lord Grey. It was the old diplomatic
method of try ing to get ahead of other Powers, but it
only annoyed our Allies and helped to break the Entente.
As in the Treaty of Sevres, it ignored the size of the
military forces of the British Empire. It took on vast
commitments without the means to carry them out.
The British army was being reduced to a few divisions.

THE TREATY OF SEVRES 121

These were needed for India and Ireland. It is not
too much to say that if all the schemes of Mr. Lloyd
George and Lord Curzon had been carried out, troops
would have been required to police a frontier from
Burma to Teheran, from Teheran to the Caspian with
a post at Constantinople. The Bolshevik advance
finally disposed of that treaty.

The East was up. A sheet of flame ran across it.
India was seething. A great Moslem pilgrimage to
Kabul was in progress as a protest against British Chris-
tian rule. The Amir thinking that India was in disorder
followed the tradition of his ancestors, declared war
and advanced on India for his loot. The Hindus were
unsettled and the Amritzar riots were a symptom. In
Egypt there was revolt. The East was indeed aflame,
and it was not merely the Moslem East for Hindus and
Moslems in India, Syria Christians and Mohammedans
in Syria against the French, and Copts and Moslems in
Egypt, had combined for resistance on common grounds.

June found the British Empire in the East buffeted
with great blows and rocking to its foundations. Of
force there was none to employ. Ireland had absorbed
the small army that the British were prepared to support.
We had enmeshed ourselves in the wastes of Mesopo-
tamia, and the Arabs rose against our benign rule on
the 3rd of June. In Turkey the Nationalists had cleared
all Anatolia of Allied troops, except the Greeks in the
Smyrna area, and the British had fallen back on a line
behind Ismidt to cover Constantinople. In front of
them entrenched was the last remnant of the Sultan’s
troops. The Turks waited no more. Ali Fuad Pasha

122

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

attacked. He drove in the half-hearted Sultanic troops
without effort, and they retired tlirough the British lines.
Without hesitation the Nationalists attacked the British.
On the night of the I5th-i6th of June three assaults
were repulsed with difficulty. The French were hard
pressed at Heraclea. Irregulars raided the villages on
the Asiatic shores of the Bosphorus and from Beicos
opened fire on the fleet as it lay at anchor there. A
shot or two struck the Austrian Embassy where the
British High Commissioner and his staff were lodged.

I was asleep on a terrace in the Embassy when I
was awaked before dawn by the rifle fire. There was
confusion and panic and noise. Across the Bosphorus
came firing and shouting. Below in the village on our
side the Christians were running round in terror. A
battleship opened fire with its light guns and a regiment
of Indian infantry was hurried up. But it was a lesson.
The raiders were the skirmishers of the Turkish Army.
Constantinople, the High Commission, the handful of
Allied troops lay naked and exposed to them except for
the navy ; and in an affair of this nature ships are of
little value except for evacuation.

The few troops in the Asiatic shore were in detach-
ments down the railway to Ismidt that runs along the
shore of the Marmora. As soon as the Turks realized
the position they proceeded to pass down the flank
towards Constantinople. At Derindje the depot of
stores was burnt and blown up in preparation for retreat.
The long bridge on the railway beyond Guebze was
mined for destruction. The Turks were seen to be
massing for an attack on the Ismidt detachment. It

THE TREATY OF SfiVRES

123

was a critical hour. The fleet opened fire and the great
shells blew up the Cloth Factory of Ismidt behind which
the enemy troops were concentrating, and did great
damage. For the minute the Turks hesitated. On the
Dardanelles they were pressing in and the defences and
guns there were destroyed. All preparation for a hur-
ried evacuation of the Allies’ forces was made. The
townspeople of Constantinople were in terror, for they
could not but see what was happening. There were
but two alternatives — to fight or run, and the Allies
did not appear able or willing to fight.

CHAPTER XIV

The Greeks save the Allies and thrust
back the Turks

T he Allied Premiers looked round in despair.
At last they half realized the situation. The
East was up. The Bolsheviks were becoming
dominant. The Turks were about to throw the Allied
troops “ bag and baggage ” and in rout, out of Con-
stantinople. Great Britain had her hands full. The
few troops at her disposal were in Ireland. The Indian
Army was doubtful in loyalty, and even its British officers
were disgruntled with constant changes and the insistent
threats of reduction. The French were busy in Syria
and Africa and still afraid of Germany. The Italians
were striving with the agonies of attempted red revolu-
tion. The Premiers looked round in despair.

Quiet, plausible, unmoved stood M. Venizelos. His
eye-glasses and charm of manner give him an air of
childlike simplicity, but, as ever, with careful shrewd
calculation he was ready in Paris. At a reasonable
price he was prepared to place the Greek troops at the
disposal of the Allies. The price of more land round
Smyrna and the immediate occupation of Eastern Thrace
were at once agreed upon. The Greelcs would do the

124

THE GREEKS SAVE THE ALLIES 125

dirty work of the Allies. Moreover, as Mr. Lloyd
George fully realized, Greece was always open to coer-
cion by a Power with a fleet.

The Allies urged the Greeks to go forward at once.
The French were as insistent as the British, They saw
that a Greek advance meant a relaxation of pressure
in Cilicia and the Turks off the Baghdad line. They
urged General Paraskevopoulos, the Greek Commander-
in-Chief, not to delay.

The Greeks advanced on the aand of June, 1920.
On all fronts they met with easy success. Their regular,
well-conditioned troops advanced with hardly a check.
Eastern Thrace was at once occupied. The Turks fled.
Jaffar Tahir, the Turkish Commander, was ignominiously
captured. The Greeks marched into Adrianople, and
close up to the city of Constantinople within long gun
range, on the line laid down in the Treaty of Sfevres.
From Smyrna three columns advanced. The one in
conjunction with the British fleet went due north and
cleared the south coast of the Marmora and took Brusa.
The second advanced straight into the Turks at Ala-
shehir, and then left the plains to mount the plateau
and halted at Ushaq. The third from Aidin advanced
out, keeping parallel with the column on Ushaq ; and
a division was sent to Ismidt to take over the peninsula
and to cover the Allies in Constantinople. Everywhere
the Turks had broken and retreated with little resistance.

The position was saved. The Allied Premiers were
once more under the delusion that they were dealing
with the scrappy remnants of the tumbled-down Ottoman
Empire. They pointed to the Greek success as proof

126

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

that their advisers on the spot had been over-anxious
and their information incorrect. But they had misread
the real situation. The Turks were vigorously organiz-
ing away in Anatolia. The troops driven in by the
Greeks were but screens of irregulars and outposts.
The Turkish nation with its teeth set was straining to
get ready. It was fighting for its very life.

M. Venizelos had contracted to be allowed to advance
as far as the main railway and to hold Eski-Shehir and
Afion-Kara-Hissar. This was sound strategy with a
good line along his front and a good railway to Smyrna
and his base. But he stopped at Ismidt, Brusa, Ushaq
and beyond Aidin in deference to the wishes of the
Allies. In this decision lay disaster. The four columns
were disconnected. Their communications with the
base were good only in one case. Strategically their
new line had nothing in its favour, and, if attacked by
good troops, they must have been broken in detail.
With the coming winter the Greeks were to suffer
much and to gain nothing by their advance.

Meanwhile the Allies were content. Damad Ferid
for the Sublime Porte signed the treaty in August, and
preparations were made to put its provisions into force,
even before ratification. The Turkish nation beyond the
Greek outposts had been forgotten.

At this moment, had the Allies been prepared to make
a milder peace, there is little doubt that this could
have been done. The Turks were much shaken by the
Greek attack. The Nationalist regular troops were not
ready. If the Greeks continued to advance, they could
not be stopped. The Turkish generals could give

THE GREEKS SAVE THE ALLIES 127

ground to save time ; but it meant giving to their hated
and despised enemy good pieces of Anatolia, and it
meant that these had to be recovered. The Greeks
were prepared to compromise, for they felt the strain.
But the Allies upheld the terms of the Treaty of Sevres ,
and, within the Allied zone in Constantinople, Damad
Ferid and the Sultan thundered out their hatred and
were for no compromise.

By the autumn of 1920 the position had crystallized.
The Allies with a handful of troops sat in Constantinople
and held a small neutral zone round it, that contained
the Straits and the Bosphorus. Beyond them and pro-
tecting them and their only protection was the Greek
screen making a complete barrier on every side. And
beyond that in Anatolia were the Turks working and
organizing, growing formidable, and on their side were
Time and Space and the unknown forces of Central
Asia and Bolshevik Russia. Within the Allied zone
the Powers quarrelled. The old intrigues were in full
play. The nominal Turkish Government with the
Sultan still remained, but it had become no more than
the Borough Council of Constantinople, with limited
powers. Except as an irritant, it had ceased to affect
the situation.

Constantinople had become a backwater. The Home
Government paid scanty attention to its representatives
on the spot. I had always been surprised at the maimer
the advice and information offered by those on the
spot was ignored by the Home Government. Hardly
a recommendation on important subjects made by the
High Commissioner was accepted. His warnings were

ia8 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

laughed at and his advice was passed over. He had
not been consulted before the occupation of Smyrna
by the Greeks. In its early stages he had wished to
deal with the Nationalist movement, and he had been
forbidden to do so. He had had no say in the terms
of the Treaty of Sevres. In every case his advice had
been sound, and it had been ignored or listened to
too late. Now the High Commission had become no
more than a glorified post-ofiice, with a department for
forwarding and re-addressing letters and requests. There
was an incident that aptly illustrated the position.
Eighteen days after the issue of the Treaty of Sevres
no copy had reached the High Commission. Mr. Ryan,
the Dragoman, when visiting the Grand Vizier, saw
that he had several copies on a table, and Damad Ferid
Pasha kindly gave him a copy. From this we discovered
the exact details of the Treaty of Sevres. It is said
that Admiral Sir John de Robeck, the High Commis-
sioner, telegraphed the same evening to the Foreign
Office to the effect :

“ Beg to inform you Turks have to-day presented
terms of Peace Treaty to Allies,”

and that the laconic reply came back :

“ High Commissioner’s number so and so not under-
stood.”

That reply was symbolical of the relation between
the Home Government and the High Commissioner.
Had his advice been followed, or even listened to, in
the early months of the Armistice, the impasse now
arrived at would not have occurred. Wireless and tele-

THE GREEKS SAVE THE ALLIES 129

phone and telegraph and swift ships and trains had
withdrawn his power to act. A hundred years ago he
would have acted quickly and decisively on his own
initiative. The Empire was built by local action carried
through by men of spirit. Now he was tied to the
end of a telegraph wire and his orders were always
to wait and remain inactive, while he watched chances
slip away and disaster chase out victory.

In October 1920 I left Turkey on leave. Constanti-
nople was short-circuited. The military decisions rested
with the Greeks and the Turks. The peace decisions
lay between Paris, Athens and Angora. As the last
pawn in the hands of the Allies the city and area of
Constantinople was retained.

I travelled on the Orient Express and there I found
Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. Tom Shaw, Mrs. Philip
Snowden and a party of the leading Socialists from
France, Holland and Belgium.

They had just returned from Southern Russia after
a careful investigation into the results of the Russian
Revolution. They were openly depressed. The so-
called “ Workers’ Revolution,” that had been acclaimed
as one of the successes of the Labour movement, had
proved a failure. It had been a vast experiment along
lines preached by the Socialists, and it had brought
nothing but black ruin. Without hesitation Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald and his friends pronounced Bolshevism to
be a failure. They were convinced that fire and sword
and the use of naked force were not the way to produce
a new and perfect social order. They were opposed
to “ Force ” in all its forms.

K

130

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The Labour Parties of Western Europe and especially
the British seemed at that moment to be at the parting
of the ways. To attain their ends they had to choose
between constitutional and legal methods or the line of
“ direct action ” with strikes and sabotage and red
revolution. They had to decide whether they would
strive slowly to mould the present state of affairs into
the form that they desired, or whether, as had been
done in Russia, they would set to work to try, as a^minority,
to seize power, tear up and destroy the existing system
and out of the resulting ruins construct a new state.

The “ Third International,” and the Russian Bol-
sheviks behind it, claimed their allegiance. The “ Second
International ” had proved to be too much a mixture
of m i l k and water. The attempt to form a “ Two-and-a-
Half International ” had caused more humour than result.

On that journey I saw that even these International
Socialists at times showed an insular spirit, even some
patriotism and a touch of imperialism that sat more
naturally on them than Internationalism. At times they
seemed to find their “ brother ” socialists of other
nations difficult to put up with, and the “ brotherhood
of man ” a phrase easier to discuss than to live up to ;
so that when Stambulinski, the peasant premier of Bul-
garia, came aboard the train they found little in common
with him.

We passed through northern Italy and there at Milan
we saw red revolution lashing out to get control, bringing
with it ruin, disorganization and despair.

We raced through France and, having passed the time
in pleasant conversation, we came once more to England.

CHAPTER XV

England in the Post-War Reaction

A t a casual glance the change in England from
the early days of the Armistice appeared small,
but it was in reality fundamental. The tide
of the war spirit, of patriotism, of pulsing enthusiasm,
that had carried men laughing gaily to almost certain
death and women to the heights of self-denial, was gone.
The people now rode wildly on a tide of a new pros-
perity. Money was abundant and freely spent. There
was a great rush of trade. That life was a gamble and
uncertain and to be enjoyed to-day while it existed,
that the future was so problematic that saving was mere
folly, were relics of the War. They tinged life in every
stratum of society. Old classes were dead or dying,
and new classes arising. The new conditions of life
were not yet understood nor assimilated. In places
there was irritation that automatically life had not fallen
back into the placid grooves of pre-war days.

I was determined to find out here at the centre the
causes and the reasons that had led to the follies in
Turkey. I probed in vain, for no one knew. It seemed
to be imagined that the policies and decisions were
made in Constantinople, whereas in Constantinople

131

132

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

it was imagined that they were made in London,

I had hardly arrived, however, before my leave was
cancelled and I was once more employed in the War
OfHce, From this vantage-point the causes of British
error in the Near East became apparent. As in Con-
stantinople the High Commission, so in London the
Foreign Office, was short-circuited. Foreign policy was
exclusively directed by Mr. Lloyd George from No. lo
Downing Street and by the Cabinet Secretariat who
lived across the other side of Whitehall.

The strength of the British Constitution has lain in
its permanent officials who coming from one class
inherit traditions of offices and policies, who are unmoved
by failure or success and without brilliance or marked
originality keep in the stern straight channel of common
sense the stream of politicians who come into office
above them. Under the system now in vogue the per-
manent officials were ignored ; the traditional policies
were neglected ; old knowledge was consigned to dusty
shelves ; and the enthusiasms of the minute, not viewed
on the background of codified experience, led the politi-
cians into the bypaths of adventures. The control of
Parliament in foreign affairs existed no more, for, at
least publicly, the Foreign Secretary accepted the position.

The attitude of Lord Curzon at this date was hard
to explain. He was a man of great ability and long
experience. His brains were exceptional, but, as the
muscles of a stout man are overlaid with fat, so they
were overlaid with an enormous pomposity. His tact-
lessness had become a proverb, and his remarks were
quoted in every capital of Europe not for their wit,

ENGLAND IN THE POST-WAR REACTION 133

but for their stupendous conceit. His manners with his
staff and friends, with the Houses of Parliament, and
with Foreign Ministers raised constant irritation, and
had an evil effect. He had many enemies, and he
attracted no friends. In 1920 he was fully aware of
the errors that Mr. Lloyd George was making in the
Near East, and yet he allowed the Foreign Office to
be short-circuited and silenced, and his own views to
be ignored ; while errors were made that endangered
the peace of the world and the prosperity of future
generations. Rumour has it, and it may well be true,
that Mr. Lloyd George remarked, “ Behold, I am
honoured with a gilded doormat.”

But the cardinal cause of failure lay far deeper in
the loosening of grip in England. The treaty with
Turkey had been postponed partly to deal with the
more pressing problems of Germany and partly to allow
the United States to take up the promises made by
President Wilson. The war spirit that might have held
the Allies together and enforced a clear-cut peace was
dead, and after it had come disappointment at the result
of the War. The reaction was in full swing and there
was a determination among all classes to avoid at all
costs any further use of force, to reduce the fighting
services and the striking power of the Empire, to cut
expenses and avoid all commitments.

For the minute the things of the spirit strove with
the things of the world ; but down the wind of the
reaction, against the spiritual stimulus of the war, came
a great boom in Materialism. For one minute on the
nth of November at the burial of the Unknown Warrior

134

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

the country saw vividly the tremendous price it had
paid. For days the stream of mourners stretched many
miles in every direction from Whitehall and these were
but a small part of those who had suffered loss. The
Great Empire remembered its agony and mourned its
splendid youth destroyed, its vitality sapped and its
prosperity in ruins. And then a priest in North London
shouted openly the half-formed fear which had grown
in every mind, that all this had been a waste, and a
folly and a poor delusion. Great love, self-sacrifice and
patriotism had inspired men to the great struggle. Now
the rage of the nations, as they had flown at each other,
seemed but a vulgar self-seeking brawl for trade and
material advantages.

The temporary prosperity had a sense of unreality,
and behind it was danger from Labour grown restive,
even over-boisterous. There were foreign propaganda
and ** Red Flag ” ideas. The ordinary British work-
man appeared soimd and steady, but many of his leaders
wished to rush him into revolution. The coal-miners
struck on the i6th of October on such poor grounds,
that it appeared that their leaders hoped to hurry them
into direct action.” Two days later a demonstration
of xmemployed came to Downing Street, and the foreign
element in the crowd turned it into a serious riot. I
watched the original advance up Downing Street, and
it was good-tempered. I went with the crowd as it
looted in the Strand, and the men round me were the
scum of the slums. They were foreign-bred Jews and
the evil beasts of other coimtries who afflict Whitechapel
with their presence, and they snarled and walked like

ENGLAND IN THE POST-WAR REACTION 135

unkempt wild beasts. They were the foreign element
of unrest that brought with it ideas of red revolution
as catching and as deadly as the plague. The railways
and the transport services threatened to strike. The
ordinary worker had little interest in so doing. I visited
many stations and talked with the men, and, as else-
where, the extremists were forcing the pace, running
them oS their feet in the hope of a burst of revolution.

Ireland was a sheet of flame ; a trouble close, insistent,
threatening and eating out the heart of and paralysing
the Empire.

Suddenly in November without warning, almost as
it were in a night, the prosperity of trade was gone.
A severe slump set in, and trading concerns of all sorts
went bankrupt in numbers.

Whitehall made a fitting setting for these events.
One day it was a surging mass of angry, resentful rioters
incited by foreigners. Within a month it was crowded
with a vast, reverent concourse bareheaded, mourning
the patriotic dead in a silence so profound that the
sound of the pigeons on the arch of the National Gallery
came clear and soothing. Within ten days it was full
of unemployed, marching with crude banners, demand-
ing work ; and within three weeks again it was full of
the massed bands of the Guards as they brought home,
with all the splendour of the Army, the nine oflacers
murdered in Dublin. It illustrated the instability and
the pressing problems at hand. It explained why the
British Government had little time or energy for the
Near East. The average man cared not at all what
happened to Turkey, and those interested and affected

136 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

had not realized the birth of New Turkey nor that there
was growing a Power able to resist the Allies.

But from various quarters the Turks found sym-
pathizers. There were a number of experts and persons
genuinely of the belief that, as a great Mohammedan
power, it was our duty to be friendly to Turkey. With
them were a mass of Indian officials and officers brought
up in the traditions of the Punjaub and the Moslem
element of the Indian Army and administrative services
in India, With these stood Mr. Montagu, the Secretary
of State for India.

It was a curious anomaly that any Western Power
should have had such a man in office. From the minute,
in 1919, when he shepherded the Indian delegation
before the Peace Conference, it was obvious that this
was an Asiatic fighting for Asia against the European.
In a stray minute I wandered down the main corridor
of the India Office. Its walls are covered with the
pictures of the Secretaries of State for India. There
were there great men with great names. Their cast of
face showed their breeding and their essential European
character. Alone among them sneered down the photo-
graph of Mr. Montagu, with a face Asiatic and Eastern.

He became the champion of the Khalifate and of
the Turks as the protectors of the Khalif. He became
the mouthpiece of the combine of Moslems and Hindus
of India that used the bogey of Pan-Islam and the
Khalifate for their own political ends. He spent much
of his time pathetically complaining that no one would
listen to him or pay attention to his warnings.

Over all Mr. Lloyd George rode rough-shod till Lord

ENGLAND IN THE POST-WAR REACTION 137

Curzon and the Foreign Office came to a state of sus-
pended animation, and Mr. Montagu and the India
Office to that of suspended irritation.

Mr. Lloyd George had grown almost abnormal in
his belief in and his respect for the Greeks. He was
not au courant with the problems of the Near East.
He had little knowledge of the value of its various peoples.
As a politician much of his strength lay in the Non-
conformist vote, and this was solidly against the Turks.
He had behind him the tradition of Gladstone. He
realized the vital importance of the Mediterranean as
a high-road of the Empire and that both Italy and
France desired to make it their own specially preserved
lake. He saw that a Greater Greece was an aid to
British policy. He had stumbled on the undoubted
fact that for many a long day Greek and British interests
in the Mediterranean must go hand in hand. It is said
that he had also stumbled on to the knowledge that
there had been an Ancient Greece with its great poets
and philosophers and that this had inspired his Welsh
soul. This may or may not be so, for, as M. Clemenceau
once said, “ I know that Mr. Lloyd George can read,
but I do not know if he ever does.’’

Under the influence of the charm of M. Venizelos
he saw in a brilliant picture a Greek Empire reviving
in Europe and Anatolia the splendours of its ancestors,
keeping open the Straits for Europe, holding back the
Asiatic and infidel Turk, and maintaining the Mediter-
ranean high-road for the British Empire. He recog-
nized that if Greece should grow obstreperous, she was
open to rapid punishment by a sea-power.

138 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Without hesitation he had thrown in all his weight
on the Greek side. He ignored the experts who warned
him of failure and even M.Venizelos, who in late 1919
told him that Greece could not stand too great a strain.
When the facts became obvious, he still refused to see
them. The vision that he had seen was magnificent,
but it was false in the most vital essentials. The Greeks
did not possess the art of ruling. They had neither
the ability nor the resources to carry out the great role
assigned to them. Mr. Lloyd George chose a weapon
that broke in his hand.

As a warning came three severe blows. As the result
of a fantastic combination of incidents King Alexander
died on the 25th of October, 1920, from the effects
of the bite of a monkey. The Greeks recalled King
Constantine and his German wife, and ejected M.
Venizelos. The French had long since ceased to aid
the Greeks and were actively helping the Turks. They
seized this opportunity to repudiate officially their
support of Greece.

The Bolsheviks defeated the armies of General Wran-
gel, and so chased out of Southern Russia the last of
the anti-revolutionary forces. Mustapha Kemal and
the Bolsheviks formed an alliance and portioned out
Armenia between them.

The ejection of M. Venizelos from Greece and the
defeat of General Wrangel were due to a common
cause. In both cases the Allies had interfered in the
private quarrels of other states, and by their interference
ensured the success of their enemies and the failure
of their proteges. They had not so much backed the

ENGLAND IN THE POST-WAR REACTION 139

wrong horse as backed one horse, and automatically it
had become the wrong one.

The ejection of M. Venizelos amazed many people,
but it was supremely natural. The Greeks as a whole
were fond of their king, and they had shown little desire
to enter the Great War on the side of the Allies. Veni-
zelos throughout 1916 fought for the Allies. He worked
against his king and the general sentiment of the Greeks.
He never understood the Greeks. They hated him, for
he was a Cretan. On the 25th of June, 1917, he marched
into Athens with a French force at his back and carried
the country into the war. The allied victory gave him
great prestige, but no popularity.

Throughout the next few years he was a dictator.
The prisons were full of his political opponents. He
was autocratic. He refused the Greeks the liberty to
argue and talk politics, which, in Athens, meant that he
was sitting on the safety-valve. In his republican ideas
he was in opposition to the general sentiment, and his
power rested on foreign bayonets, on foreign money and
on the foreign influence which he had introduced into
an internal quarrel. He was ejected, and, when he was
called back in the hour of defeat, it was because the
Greeks were convinced that without foreign help they
were lost.

These events in Greece and the Turkish-Bolshevik
alliance should have been somewhat of a warning, but
they were ignored. It is a curious commentary on the
role of a politician. The backing of M. Venizelos and
Greece was a fatal error of judgment that involved great
losses. Had a soldier or sailor made such an error, he

140

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

would have been relieved of his command, but Mr.
Lloyd George continued to thrive.

Without grasping the realities or considering the
potentialities of the position, steps were taken to put
the terms of the Treaty of Sevres into action, and I
found myself detailed to assist in forming the necessary
organization and plans. Commissions of all sorts, as
in the treaty, were plotted out. Pay and equipment
and their knotty details were argued over and laid down.
From every direction came a rush of officers of all ranks
looking for good jobs. The idea was abroad that Tur-
key was to be, as Egypt under Kitchener, a breeding-
place for future field-marshals, under the rising young
General, Sir Charles Harington. Generals and colonels
and subalterns were fitted into the personnel of the
Commissions. The Treasury advanced some money to
be recovered in due course from the Turks. Hand-
books and maps and diagrams were printed ; and yet
it was all empty paper-work and stupid vapouring.
Without force the Treaty of Sevres could not be carried
out. The Allies were unable to employ force. The
Greeks were incompetent and now unwilling to do their
dirty work. England had ceased to think in World
terms. She thought now in terms of England.

Having been transferred to General Head-Quarters
Allied Forces of Occupation in Turkey, I proceeded
with a party of officers early in January 1921, and we
took with us all the carefully prepared instructions for
the carrying out of the Treaty of Sevres.

CHAPTER XVI

The Greco-Turkish War. The First Greek
Advance, 1921

I FOUND Constantinople changed but little. Inside
it had been flooded by a new wave of refugees.
The Bolsheviks had broken the lines dug across
the Perekop Isthmus, chased Wrangel and his army
out of the Crimea and taken Sevastopol. Wrangel’s
army with its wives and families and a host of refugees
had crowded into ships and arrived off Constantinople
on the 1 6th of November. For a while they had been
forbidden to land, and, packed tight together, with no
food, a prey to swift diseases, there they had lain at
anchor a floating city of the dying. Then tbey had
come ashore in tens of thousands and swamped and over-
crowded the city, replete already with refugees of every
nationality. To be a refugee had become a trade and a
permanent profession.

Constantinople and the Allies were protected from
harm and cut off from the rest of the world by a wall of
Greek troops. On every side there were Greeks. They
held all the Asiatic shore from the Black Sea to the
Marmora and down past Chanak to the Mediterranean.
In Europe they were down the Gallipoli Peninsula and

141

142

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

astride of Thrace. As I came in I was vetted ’’ by
their controls. All letters and telegrams going out had
to be handled by their censors.

In the streets of the city there were but few Turks
to be seen, and their women either remained indoors or
had gone to Anatolia with the men to help in the fight.
The little sound news that came through showed that
the Nationalists were working at top pressure, that
they were acting with an unexpected vigour and efiiciency ,
and that the chance of the Treaty of Sfevres being enforced,
or of any settlement being made, was as distant as ever.
On the 30th of January, 1921, Mustapha Kemal pro-
claimed that the Sublime Porte had ceased to rule, and
that the Government of Turkey was now in Angora.

Despite these unfavourable circumstances, the pre-
parations to put the Treaty of Sevres into force were
continued and the commissions prepared to get to
work. Among other things the military authorities
woke to the realization that in the Constantinople area
there were enormous dumps of war material, and that
even these had been neglected and poorly guarded.

I found myself detailed to this duty and set to work
to photograph the depots and sites, and to count and
catalogue the unholy jumble of stores, ammunition,
rifles and guns of all sorts. It was obvious that there
had been, and still was, extensive pillaging of all stores
and ammunition of value. It was difficult to prevent
it. All departments of the Constantinople Government
were working full time to help Angora, and the Allied
control but touched the fringe of their activities. The
French authorities gave them all facilities to ship away

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

H3

the war material. The guards on nearly all the depots
were Turks, and so automatically Nationalists, and glad
to help to get away munitions to fight the accursed
Greeks.

In the great depot on the Golden Horn the matter
reached a climax. With my Turkish colleague I put
seals of wax, as used in Turkey, on the great iron doors,
but invariably at the next visit the seals were gone.
The guards were arrested. The junior officers were
sent to jail. At last the senior in charge was to be
tried. A commission for the Ministry of War could
throw no light on the subject nor give any help.

In despair I replaced the seals and prepared to hide
and watch for myself. The doors of the sheds looked
on to a large yard stacked with shells for heavy guns
and ammunition-waggons and much rubbish. It had
grown thick with yoimg grass and at the other side
came down to a long quay on the Golden Horn. I
reached my hiding-place with some difficulty. The
sentries were more alert than I had expected. I stood
to be shot if seen slinking about, or, worse still, made
to look ridiculous. During the evening the sentries
smoked and lounged and at sunset when they were
changed, and while the muezzins were calling to prayer,
half a dozen goats were shut into the yard. In the half-
light I saw a ridiculous he-goat with a tufted beard
deliberately walk up to the doors and eat off each of my
seals in turn and then return to nibble grass. It is a
strange country, this Turkey. As often in a club the
wildest stories of the recognized liar are strictly and
disconcertingly true, so here many a wild impossibility

144

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

is the fact. For myself, being thin-skinned, I held my
peace and affixed seals, not of wax, but of lead, and
indigestible.

Still, goats or no goats, wherever there was material of
value, it was consistently removed and shipped away to
Anatolia, and our allies assisted the Turks to avoid
the controls. The agents employed by General Head-
Quarters throve on their reports on this gun-running.
It was such an open secret and so easily come by, that
they reported correctly and drew their pay in ease. They
had long since combined into a close corporation and
had quite an efficient staff for manufacturing and co-
ordinating information, rarely correct but always sale-
able. From a dozen ‘‘independent’’ sources would
come exact details of a plot or a raid and then the agents
at General Head-Quarters who had invented the idea
would be sent in hot haste to investigate. It was a
whole new trade. It grew rapidly with wide rami-
fications and financial possibilities ; for the Turks had
paid their agents only by results.

My assistants on the depots were a few British and a
number of Turks. Brain-power, education and, above
all, imagination have much to do with fear, and as
these Turks had little of the former they had likewise
little fear. They smoked cigarettes placidly in powder
factories. They dumped coal and shells and boxes of
tri-nitro-toluene together, and then would break up a
few old ammunition boxes and light a fire to cook and
warm themselves in the lee of the dump, and this in a
thickly populated suburb of the city where the houses
were of wood. They handled without emotion explo-

GENDARMERIE BATTALION COMMANDER AND SECTION COMMANDERS
ON CASTLE STEPS AT THE MOUTH OF THE BOSPHORUS

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

H5

sives which should have been kept locked up and in
water and which under the circumstances ought to have
blown them sky-high. They dropped shells about,
sometimes with their thin delicate German fuses set,
and marched off solidly to get another load. They were
disconcerting people with whom to work on a cold morning.

By May of 1921 this work was finished, and I pro-
ceeded to Chanak on intelligence duty. The situation
in Anatolia had by now taken on a more ugly character.
In February a conference of the Allies with the Turks
and Greeks had been held in London. It had broken
up in March without result. King Constantine was in
a fix. Tactically the line he held, as the result of M.
Venizelos’ agreement with the Allies, was unsound.
His own position needed a rousing victory, and Greece
could not continue to stand indefinitely the strain of
her adventure in Anatolia. No great distance ahead, and
running across his front, was the Anatolian railway.

On the 23rd of March the Greeks advanced, with the
intention of taking Afion-Klara-Hissar and Eski-Shehir,
getting control of the railway and from there driving
straight at Angora and so bringing the Turks to their
knees and finishing the War. In this they received
no support from the Allies. They were advised not to
persist. They were not sufficiently prepared. The old
war-tried officers of the Venizelist regime had been ejected
for political reasons, and untried and often inefficient
royalists had been put in their places. The Greeks failed
to reach their first objective and in the middle of April
they retired back to the old line.

Systematically, cruelly and under orders the Greeks

L

146

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

now set out to devastate, with the accompaniment of
murder and rape of children and burning of houses,
the Moslem villages within their control. They strained
every nerve to prepare for a new offensive. They
shipped over guns and food, and called fresh recruits
and reservists to the colours. They refused all attempts
at Allied mediation and pinned their hopes on a decisive
military victory.

As a result, acting under orders from their Govern-
ments, the Allied High Commissioners, on the 15th of
May, declared that there was now in existence a new
Greco-Turkish War, and that in this they were strictly
neutral. They declared that Constantinople and an
area round it were to be treated as a neutral zone. They
politely washed their hands of the Greeks, whom they
had used, and left them and the Turks to fight out their
own quarrel as they liked, provided that they kept out
of the neutral zone and did not annoy them. The
organized atrocities of the Greeks produced a natural
reprisal, and the Turks set to work to wipe out all Greeks
in the areas in their power.

Round Chanak these things showed themselves.
Beyond the neutral zone were a sprinkling of regular
Hellenic troops from Greece but the rest were the local
j Ottoman Greeks armed and formed into companies.
They were inefiicient, nervous and cowardly. In time
of stress or strain they invariably failed the Hellenic
troops. They intensified the bitterness of the conflict,
for they were hideously cruel in committing atrocities,
and they revenged themselves horribly on their Turkish
neighboiurs. Their pent-up hatred of the centuries was

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

H7

given free play ; and yet they were terrified of the Turks.
In London and New York ladies and missionaries in
drawing-rooms continued unwittingly to honour these
foul monsters.

§

One late May evening I came down the road that
made the neutral frontier by the town of Bigha. There
was news of a fight. From a hill-top in our area I
could see a running battle in a valley close below me.
The Greeks from Bigha had marched out to sack and
bum a village, and, as they returned, the Turks from
a village in the neutral area had slipped across and
caught them. The Greeks broke at once. They had
the terror of the Turk in them, and in twos and threes
scattered and ran for home like rabbits. In the town
of Bigha there was terror. Men in Greek uniform were
taking cover behind any door or comer in fantastic
fear. The streets were empty and the doors barred,
except for a few old befezed Turks who sat by the cafes
and drew placidly at their water-pipes. When I reached
the Turkish village within our area, it was still and
quiet. The courteous headman denied all knowledge
of a fight and said that perhaps brigands were involved,
but out of the comer of my eye I saw the men with
their rifles slipping home between the houses. In the
sacked village the mosque and the houses were in smoking
ruins and flat with the ground and the corpses of little
children and old men were in the ditches. It was a
terrible war of massacre of neighbours The area was
all on edge, and as we went home down the road in

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

148

the dark I sang and whistled in cold fear, that nervous
watchers should make no mistake as to who we were.

All this area, from here to Smyrna and all the sea-
board, had in ancient days been a rich fertile land.
It had supplied the com and the minerals of the Ancient
World and it had teemed with luxurious cities. Now
it was empty, except for a few poor scattered villages.
Touring I came at last to the village of Marmeris that
lies on the headland above the Narrows, where the
current is rapid and the Straits are but a mile broad.

It was the fast of Ramazan ; but the Circassian head-
man gave me good food cooked by his fasting servants
and served by his younger brothers, as was his custom.
To pass his long hungry day he took me down to the
headland. We sat in an ancient graveyard where the
tombs of slabs of stone stood out on every side. Down
to us came the valleys and hills and on these had been
the ancient city of 30,000 souls, with its streets and
houses and baths. Once perhaps in a generation, he
told me, a ploughman would find a diamond or a ruby
dropped in the bygone centuries in the third valley, for
there had been the street of the jewellers. Now the
valleys were full of long grass and wild flowers and trees
swa3ring in the sea breeze and the warm lazy sxm. Over
it dl had come the blight of Ottoman rule. The sun
and die fertile soil and the blue rich sea was the same,
but on the shore below us were one stone house and
twenty broken shanties which had replaced the great
town. Continued misrule had destroyed it and Nature
had in due course spread a fresh carpet over the scar.
So was it with all this land.

CHAPTER XVII

Skutari and the Turkish Gendarmerie

T he Allied authorities in Constantinople were
preparing to take some action on the Treaty
of Sevres. The officers detailed to the com-
missions had arrived and, having seen the sights of
Stambul, were now impatient for work. The treaty
was still in existence only on paper. Lieutenant-General
Sir Charles Harington had taken over as the General
Officer Commanding the Allied Forces of Occupation
in Turkey ; a title which though it had a fine sound
was humorous and Gilbertian, for his jurisdiction ran
over a handful of British troops and the few square
miles of the neutral zone, and his Allied Command ”
consisted in his right to try to persuade his unwilling
French and Italian colleagues to act with him.

The Greeks were preparing for their second great
offensive. They required every man. They were, more-
over, not so trusting and amenable as in the days of
Venizelos. They were unwilling to continue to do the
dirty work of the Allies. Hitherto they had held the
Ismidt Peninsula with the sole object of covering Con-
stantinople and from here they now, by agreement
with the Allies, began to withdraw. As they retired

149

150 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

they burned, without justification, the Moslem villages
on their road.

They were replaced for the minute by a handful of
British and Turkish cavalry to keep order, but a gendarme
battalion was to be formed to take over the whole area,
under the Constantinople Government, and this was
to be supervised by British officers. I was recalled and
posted to this battalion, with my head-quarters in the
town of Skutari.

§

From the pier at Beshik Tash, that lay below the
Sultan’s summer palace, I took a rowing boat to cross
to Skutari. I left while the night mist still lay on the
water and before the sun was up. The shores of the
Bosphorus were lined with white villas and palaces
and mosques and walled gardens, mostly in disrepair.
They rarely repair in this country, but allow their houses
to fall into ruins and then rebuild or abandon them.
Strong solid houses, that will last from generation to
generation, do not exist. For the Christians to build
such would be folly, and only call attention to their
wealth. Among the Moslems there is still the nomad
instinct of their ancestors and the sentiment of the
sage who said that life was but a cranky bridge and that
the man who built a strong house on it and dreamt of
it lasting was a fool and a scoffer against the Divine.

As we rowed, a school of black shining porpoises went
gambolling and diving past us. A flight of strange birds,
just skimming over the water, raced by. They are said
never to settle, but to wander continuously up and down

THE TURKISH GENDARMERIE

looking for something, and to be the “ souls of lost
women. In these parts they are very numerous.
On the marble terrace of a bumt-out palace fishermen
were dragging in long brown nets and singing in chorus
as they heaved together. From the south blew up
the damp Lodost wind that threw the waters into little
waves and turned the surface of the sea white.

We pulled up stream to round the Greek battleship,
the Avarqffy which, with her sister ship the Kilkis^ lay
here at anchor. A sentry looked down at us placidly
and I wondered that these ships should lie here in
safety. The allies had declared this to be a neutral
zone and these were neutral waters, and in all justice these
combatant ships, engaged on active service, should not
have been allowed here. In Pera was a Greek military
mission, and a Greek hospital with an armed guard,
and in the streets were Greek soldiers with rifles. Here,
in the heart of the Turkish capital, Greek ships used
the Bosphorus as their base and raided from here along
the Black Sea coast and down the Marmora to bombard
Turkish villages. The Italians and French had no
S3nnpathy with this, and the British point of view was
indefensible.

But I wondered even more that the Turks had not
made at least some attempt to sink the ships. With
a little organization it would have been easy, for they
were very vulnerable. While Turkey fought, gasping
and struggling against heavy odds for life and exis-
tence, such a blow would have been as valuable as a
great land victory. Yet not one attempt was made, and
when the Turkish Chief of the Staff at the Admiralty

152

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

was asked why he had not tried, he sighed and said that
the British would be angry.

I came to Skutari and landed at the little pier where
the porters loimge and smoke. They looked like snails,
for on their backs they carry always a leather hump,
and a porter without a hump would be no porter. They
are mostly Kurds and wild fierce men, godless and
imdisciplined. They are the instruments of every
massacre and plot. Some politician had combined them
into a corporation, and they were for ever being unruly
and lawless. They growled and glared unpleasantly
to see me come ashore, for they do not like Christians.

Skutari is quaint and old. Its streets are as steep
as those of Pera, and twist up narrow, intricate passages
where the roadway is of cobbles and the pavements
are narrow and rain-water is shot off the roofs on to
the passer-by. It is a town of twisting slums and then
open spaces and parks, of large-sized hovels and tiny
wooden shops where the shopman sits all day with a
few bags of peas or a bundle ofbed-coverlets, and appears
to sell nothing, and yet contentedly at dusk puts up
his wooden shutter and goes to the mosque to pray.

It was all Turk, Fires and troubles had routed
out the few Christians who used to live there. It was a
primitive, fanatical, antiquated place still living in the
seventeenth century. In space it was but twenty minutes
by boat from Europe. In the centuries it was 300 years
away.

They gave me a house by a soft scented park where
the women came to find their lovers. It looked away
down the Marmora and over Stambul to Thrace. My

THE TURKISH GENDARMERIE

153

ofEce was in the Government buildings, which had been
started once on a fine design but never finished ; and
even the finished bits now leaked in the rain, and let
the wind in through gaps in the floors and windows.

The Governor was a nominee of the Sultan. He
was a fat, lazy, flabby, nervous, incapable man who
cared nothing for his work, was ashamed to talk Turkish
with me, and stuck to his mongrel French, and was
querulous and pathetic, because his pay was in arrears.
He was t5q)ical of a great change. When Mustapha
Kemal set out in 1919 on his adventure he was a rebel.
Now the Sultan was of little value and the men who
remained with him were flabby inefficients such as this
man. All good Turks had long since gone to Angora.
This Governor was kept in place, because the British
General had found him submissive and had requested
the High Commission to see that he was retained. The
British still obstinately buried their heads in the sand,
and refused to see the new power that was growing in
Anatolia.

For me it was a new life. In Turkey, whatever
one does, politics creep in. The fall of a Grand Vizier
means a change right down all the ranks to the woman
who cleans the office of the clerks in some obscure
district. Still, as the day’s work, politics ceased for
me. They but added the salt of interest to a life of
adventure. As a soldier I was almost free of restraint,
for I was alone and there were no regulations to cover
each action.

I lived with the Turks, not now as a subordinate or
prisoner nor on the lofty eminence of an Embassy,

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

IS4

but as an equal. I saw with their eyes and heard with
their ears and lived their lives. I looked back at my
own people from a new position, and I experienced
some disappointment. It was as when one has lived
long in trenches and they have come to be something
large and spacious, and suddenly one sees from a sap-
head, that they are to the enemy no more than cheap
mounds such as rabbits scratch.

I had watched British life in India. Within it was
a dusty edition of suburbia and externally it was like
isolated islands in seas of teeming native life. So here
in Turkey the British were isolated. They never knew
the people nor their ideas nor their ways. They adopted
a superior air of patronage and sneered and, if possible,
kicked all those who wore fezes. They were ignorant
of the most rudimentary facts, and whoever tried to
learn these was looked on as a lost man and “ gone
native,” Their superiority did not seem so obvious
from outside. In official life they suffered from the
acute modem disease of “ paper.” They waded into
paper caring little for live personalities or live facts, but
tmsted in written words and reports. They submerged
themselves in paper till lost beneath it. If they then
saw a fact, it was as distorted as the moon through
water to a diver in the sea.

» There were eight British gendarmerie supervising
officers with separate areas, and I was given half the
Ismidt Peninsula with some 600 square miles in all.
We were given a chance to see Turkish official life
from within, as no Englishman had seen it before. I
quickly found that the Turkish and the British officials

THE TURKISH GENDARMERIE

15s

viewed their positions from different angles. In the
East an official position is an acquisition to be used. It
means money and comfort and the sitting under green
trees and the people to be used as servants. Even
if only temporary, it is a thing to be enjoyed and to
be turned to profit. To the British it means a respon-
sibility. Inspired by this and the sense of power and
the instinct to organize and control the affairs of others,
they will put away the good things of life and its com-
fort. They will sit long hours on office-stools in some
dingy hole. White with fever, they will work through
torrid heat in deserts beyond civilization. The two
conceptions are poles apart, and as widely different
as the characters of Turk and British.

I foimd my area in a sad state. Politics and war
had tom it into pieces. At the Armistice the British
had come and brought with them the ideas of the liber-
ation of Christian minorities. The local Christians
believing in these had rallied to them and been freely
used. As the British had withdrawn, the Nationalist
Turks had overrun the area and taken revenge on the
Christians, and then the Hellenic Greeks had come
and the Ottoman Greeks had taken even more brutal
revenge. Now the hills were full of brigands and
criminals and the villages lay depopulated and many
burnt, and, even from within the towns, the brigands
carried off the merchants and held them to ransom.
Between the Christians and the Moslems was a great
gulf of murder and incendiarism and rape and blood-
shed.

; We set to work under considerable difficulties, i The

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

X56

British authorities viewed the experiment with suspicion.
There was little sign of pay or equipment being supplied.
All good men had gone to Anatolia and the recruits
who came in were a few old gendarmes and a weedy
set of loafers of little value. Until we had received a
few refugees and some prisoners-of-war back from
Egypt we were not able to get to work.

Gradually we got on to our feet. It was a life full
of tremendous fun. I loved each minute of it. There
was the sifting of evidence and the making of plans and
cunning devices to outwit the criminals. There was the
detective work in the twisted streets of ancient towns
and the long marches under the open night sky, as I
watched the stars sweep up and over the heavens and
die under the sunrise. There was the hunting on horse-
back of brigands, a himting that makes tame the chasing
of the fox. There was the spice of danger and the urge
of power, and there was independence that gave a taste
to life.

I worked alone without interpreters, for I hated them
all, as individuals and as a class. I twitched at their
pidgin English, and the airs that they gave themselves
and their eastern foreign faces looking out under British
military caps. I foimd them at the bottom of every
misunderstanding. I hated them because they used
our good name to their profit and because they befouled
our honour. I preferred to struggle on alone.

For the minute the brigands reigned. They had
little fear of capture by the British cavalry which had been
sent to replace the Greeks until we were ready. They
even became hilarious at the attempts of the men on

THE TURKISH GENDARMERIE 157

great English horses or in heavy crashing boots, who
pursued them through the woods, as they slid silently
forward on their skin shoes. As well expect a buffalo
to tread on a dog. They would arrange with the intelli-
gence agents and come and talk and drink with their
innocent pursuers, who without knowledge of the lan-
guage, customs or the land were as men blind. And
so they had grown over-confident and insolent.

CHAPTER XVIII

Brigand Hunting : The Capture of Yanni

E ach week came news of robberies and murder
and villages raided and men held to ransom, but
we could do nothing, for we were not ready.
The authorities grew impatient, and when news came
of a raid on the Jewish settlement village of Yahoudi
Chiflik on the last day of July, we decided to declare
war on the brigands, though we were but half prepared.

Of exact details of the raid we had none. The small
boy who came secretly with the news could not say
who sent him. Before dawn on the ist of August we
set out to investigate. The smell of heat lay heavy in
the air and the house was still grey with the shadow
of night as I came down my rickety stairs. From the
Yeni Mosque by the pier the muezzin was callmg to
prayer.

A golden quarter of the moon, half toppling out of
die sky, was sinking low over Stambul. For a minute it
threw the minarets and mosques into black relief against
a sky of fathomless blue and then dipped into the grey
morning mist. We looked down on the park with its
tiny ponds and dilapidated bandstand to the Golden
Horn, where they were closing Galata Bridge. The

158

THE CAPTURE OF YANNI

159

first movements of the waking city caime up like the live
murmur of a distant sea. In the gardens a bird fluffed
its feathers and called. A cool breeze brought up the
scent of flowers. The flies were moving lazily and the
horses fidgeted and champed on their bits as we swung
into the saddle.

We clattered out over the cobbled streets with my
mare leading, and behind her fifteen squeaking excited
stallions who kicked and plunged. We twisted up the
narrow alley- ways, roofed over with crossed vines and
filled with the smoke from newly lighted charcoal
braziers, and between the tiny shanties of shops, until
we came to the great cemetery of Skutari. We picked our
way between jumbled ruins of headstones set at all
angles, and over patches of vivid green grass, where
black rocks bulged out here and there. We rode under
the cypress trees whose trunks were white and their
shadows jet black in the grey light before dawn. They
made the silence even more silent and the dreariness of
the graves more dreary. Here the Moslem faithful are
buried twenty deep and close by the road they lie deeper
— for even when dead, men dread to be forgotten. There
was neglect and ruin. It was all cold and ragged and
as mouldy as Death. A raven croaked. The pariah
dogs were rummaging among the bones and snarling at
each other. Waiting for death that comes to them but
slowly, the lepers crept among the graves.

We came out to I^ikli and the hills of Chamlidje,
full of gardens and flowers and white chatelets, where
the Pashas live when the summer grows dusty. I smelt
the good heather. A spring of clear water came gurgling.

i6o

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

kicking and "bubbling from the hill-side, and its laughter
was full of life clean, fresh and pure.

Beyond that we rode into great rolling plains as the
sun began to glow hot and fiery over the Anatolian
moimtains and the snows on Olympus turned rose at
the touch of day. The moving breeze kicked up light
clouds of purple dust behind the first wood carts. The
carters called to their animals and urged them forward
and salaamed to us with a hang-dog manner that seemed
to me to be that of guilty men until I learnt that it was
fear that was in their eyes. We followed the dusty
road, where my mare stumbled in the holes and ruts,
and across the barren hill ; and so at last towards evening
we came to the Village of Jews.

That there had been a raid and that they had been
robbed and beaten, there was no doubt. There was a
young woman with her arms and breasts like red steps,
where she had been beaten with the sharp edge of knives.
But no word of evidence could we get. The people were
craven and afraid. At last they pushed forward one
evil, dirty brute, who had been a camp follower in South
Africa. His English was a running stream of filthy
oaths and indecencies, but he dared talk because no one
understood him ; and from him I learnt that among the
brigands was one Yanni, the son-in-law of Christo, a
householder in the Greek village of Bakal Keuy.

We halted for the night and bit by bit from hints and
whispers we learned that it was the renowned band of
Greeks imder the brigands Zaffiri, Pavli and Karoglan
who had made the raid. That was a night of torment.
No slum in the East have I ever found so foul as this

THE CAPTURE OF YANNI ' i6i

village of Russian Jews. The myriad flies, that by the
day covered the ceilings and walls crawled over the
food and fed at the sore lids of the children’s eyes, crept
even in the dark and buzzed at each move I made. The
offal had for years been thrown out of the window^s and
doors and there it lay to stink in clotted filth, till it had
fouled all the air and the water too. From every crack
and mattress a thousand hungry parasites appeared.

We were away before dawn had shown in the east and
so came to Bakal Keuy, which was a village of Ottoman
Greeks. We sat under a great lime tree. In front of
us was the church and the village square and behind
us the little shop to which the men came to drink their
morning coffee. While we talked we ate a luxurious
breakfast of fresh eggs in oil mixed with tail fat and
bread and bitter cheese. The head man and the elders
and a queer little old priest sat round us. They were
quiet, hospitable, courteous folk, but they denied all
knowledge of Yanni or of any brigands at all and said
that all was well. And yet I knew that last month the
village had been raided and a man killed,

I was at a loss. I could not bridge the gap. As I
begged them for news a well-set-up sturdy man in a
neat blue suit with a reefer coat strolled leisurely from
the little caf^ and sat down with us. He had an easy
air of bravado. He talked boldly as one who had been
in authority. His truculence angered me, and suddenly
drawing a bow at a venture I covered him with my
revolver and arrested him. The gendarmes took him
away to cross-question him in their own terrible way,
and so brought back news that this was Anastas a member

M

i 62

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

of the band, a well-known robber who had been arrested
last year by the British and had broken prison, and that
Yanni had left that morning to hide in the hills above
the village of Kurt Dogmush.

While they saddled the horses, I turned in a fury on
the elders. They sat silent and ashamed, until the
priest who had been a refugee from Russia to Anatolia,
and from there in turn had fled before the Nationalists,
plucked up courage and said :

“ Effendi, I too lied and would lie again. You come
for a day and are gone. The government changes
often ; but the brigands are always with us.”

Suddenly, as in a flash of light in the dark, I saw it
standing out clear and insistent — ^the dreadful fear that
dominated their lives. Wherever I travelled, I saw
stark fear. Fear lay in the eyes of every man in this
country. It was a dull silent fear that would not set a
man running, but the terror of waiting for a blow from
a blind side. The people were afraid of the brigands
who raided them and cut them with knives if they did
not pay. They were afraid of the gendarmes and police
who beat them and imprisoned them. They were afraid
of their neighbours. Greek and Armenian watched
Turk, and Turk watched Greek and Armenian. No
man knew what political changes or what new evil
to-morrow might bring, and the people waited on
tip-toe.

We hurried out of the shade into the burning sun at
a canter in hot pursuit, and the dust came up in a great
cloud behind us as each stallion bucked and strained
to be near my mare. We hurried across the empty

THE CAPTURE OF YANNI 163

country over steep stone hills and across dry river beds
where the heat played in long shivering waves. Suddenly
as we topped a rise below us, half a mile away, we saw a
man swinging along, and, in defiance of the law, across
his back he carried a rifle. The sound of his noisy
singing came up to us, and then he turned and saw us
and ran for the hills and the low scrub forest above, in
which we could not follow him on horses. Without a
word, at full gallop we set at him. Helter-skelter without
formation or plan we raced hell-for-leather over the
holes and gullies, scrambled down the steep hills, tore
along a level bit on soft earth where the mare gamely
took a jump that left the gendarmes for the minute
behind. In front, with the fear of real death close on
him, twisting and making use of every narrow way, ran
our quarry. Up a narrow gully he raced where the mare
failed to get her footing and the gendarmes’ ponies
scrambled by her ; and they were on the man before
he could unsling his rifle. Faithfully at my heel was
Hadji Ramazan, my sergeant, not because he wished to
be, but because his stallion had decided to stay with my
desirable mare. He had squealed at the whip and kicked
at the spur, but stuck obstinately beside her ; and she,
being no slut, now planted her heels into his ribs as a
warning.

Sidki the Liar brought the man to me with pride.
It was no doubt that this was Yanni, the son-in-law of
Christo, and quickly they covered him with a cloak
and hid his face that no one should know whom we had
caught. It was Sidki the Liar, a typical sharp town-
bred Turk, bom of an Armenian mother and brought

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

164

up in the covered bazaar of Stambul behind the Ministry
of War, who had thought of this precaution. Now with
his dark restless eyes he looked for applause, set his
fez at a rakish angle over his hair, which he kept over-
long, and began to expatiate on his success as a brigand-
hunter. Then, looking at himself in a pocket mirror,
he gave his moustache an extra fierce upward twist, and,
with his spurs jingling on the heels of his well-polished
riding boots, he strode off with a taking air of bravado.
Sidki, though quite irreligious, had an immense contempt
for Christians, He used them to supplement his pay
with bribes. Sometimes, at a fee, he helped them to
run contraband tobacco. He was a vain man, a lover
of show, a fluent and inefficient liar, and he stole my
horses’ com.

We rode on rapidly to the village ofKurtDogmush and
there Halil Fehmi Effendi, as soon as he heard that we
had come, sent his grooms, who held our stirrups, while
we dismounted and took the horses to the stables. Fehmi
Effendi owned the village and the fields for many miles
round and flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and he
lived, as his fathers had lived before him, as a squire
with a liberal hand. He met us at his door. He killed
a sheep, and his wives basted it and stuffed it with rice
and nuts and spices that made a hunger-inciting mess.
His retainers brought it in, and Fehmi pulled back his
sleeve, while we squatted expectant round the low brass
table set on the floor, and then he shredded off sufficient
of the well-cooked meat, and sent the rest out to the
gendarmes.

The meal was no sluggish affair, wherein conversation

THE CAPTUEE OF YANNI 165

and food pass a pleasant hour. Dish foEowed dish
rapidly and was eaten quickly and in silence, except for
suctional sounds as of many vacuum cleaners. There
were eggs in oil and boiled chickens and cheese and
salads and honey and long slabs of hot bread and many
other dishes. Then they brought us water in a ewer
and towels to wash our hands and we rubbed our teeth
clean with the fingers. Replete to stupefaction I crawled
back on to the settee that ran roimd the walls, stretched
myself with caution, and, lying back at a rajah’s ease,
allowed a servant to hand and light me a cigarette.

We were late away and we took a horse from the
village to bring Yanni, but we travelled fast, for the
horses had been fed on good barley and were hard to
hold. Somewhere the men had found a Turkish woman’s
clothes, and now Yanni was veiled and covered in great
shapeless folds of coarse black cloth. I called him
Fatmeh Hanum, and even old Hadji Ramazan, the
sergeant in charge of the mounted gendarmes, though
the joke was not over-much to his liking, wrinkled up
his stem weather-beaten face and smiled.

“ Hadji,” I called, as he cursed Yanni and flicked the
village pony to keep him up. He drove his rough
stallion up beside me and, with his chin set square, his
mouth firm, and his eyes deep dark and steady, he
waited for what I shotild say.

“ Hadji ! are you not ashamed to talk with a strange
woman like this Fatmeh Hanum ? ”

“ Effendi,” he replied in his dignified stately way,
“ this is no hussy, for she keeps her face covered ” ; and
all down the line of gendarmes ran a ripple of lau^ter.

i66

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The moon was up, roimd and clear, as we came to
the pass that runs between the twin breasts of the
mountains of Chakal Dagh. The mountain path ran
steep and narrow in the shadow where the hills towered
up on the right and to the left dropped sheer two hundred
feet or more into a gorge. As the leading gendarmes
crossed the crest out into the white light a volley of
rifle shots ran out and the bullets came with a murderous
thud into the cliff-side. I saw the men fall. Their
horses turned and galloped back on us. There was
confusion and noise and the sound of men running and
vague figures and quick panic and contagious fear.

I crept forward in the black shadow, while Hadji held
my mare. Beyond me in the light one gendarme stirred
a little and groaned. Across the narrow gorge, with its
unclimbable precipitous sides, came voices talking and
a woman^s laugh, shrill and vulgar. Then in the coarse
accent of the Ottoman Greek, that rasps all the soft
music out of Turkish, she called filth and abuse on the
Turks and bade the gendarmes go home, for now the
English ruled in Turkey and the Greeks were free.
And I in my broken Turkish called back and cried
that I was the English captain, and her men bade her
be quiet. As I dared out into the white light in my
“ topee ” I heard the rolling of stones and whisperings
as they crept away, and far down below me a stream
laughed and played with itself in the loneliness of the
rocks.

We collected the men, and Yanni, hidden in his
disguise, shivered with fear lest his Greek friends should
find him, and so we came to the great forest of Alemdar.

THE CAPTURE OF YANNI 167

I lodged in the empty summer palace of one of the
Whittalls, who were Englishmen and the merchant
princes of Turkey and had grown so great and so numer-
ous that, as it was said, “ They were a family that had
narrowly avoided becoming a nation.

I could not sleep. I got up and walked out in the
light of the great moon. The forest lay quiet. Now
and again a hidden wind would sigh through the trees
and carry up an unknown scent that was a lure.^ Far
away a jackal called. Without warning a nightingale
close at hand caught its breath and burst into liquid song,
and a dozen more in the forest answered, and from
pools a thousand frogs woke the night and the tree
crickets called on twenty different notes. Then they
died to sleep and left the forest quiet except for the
but half-heard ground noises, and the wonder of the
night was supreme.

I walked a little way. From a house where the
gendarmes slept came the sound of steady blows, not
fierce or cruel but steady and methodical and brutal.
They were beating Yanni, as they beat all prisoners for
information, and his tormented gasps came sighing
and droning across the still night like the winter s wind
round an old house. My hair stiffened in sudden anger.
And then I remembered the woman of the Village of
Jews with her arms a red staircase of wounds and the
gendarme as he stirred on the head of the pass and
groaned in agony ; and I went home to sleep.

CHAPTER XIX

Brigand Hunting : The Raid on Bakal Keuy

F rom the mfonnation obtained from Yarnii it
seemed probable that the band would sleep the
next night at Bakal Keuy, for it was their habit
to follow for safety close on the heels of their pursuers.
So we rested that day in the cool of the forest, and sent
word for one hundred and fifty infantry to march from
Skutari and meet us on the road at an old post house.

Alemdar was a mixed village, in which Armenians
predominated. The villagers had long since taken all
their valuables and furniture to the towns and were ready
to fly for safety at any minute. Some of them had been
^ven rifles to protect themselves, and these were led
by one Dipovan, a drunken, useless, swashbuckling liar
of a fellow, who was afraid of his own shadow, if he wore
a fez. He was the official agent of the British nailitaiy
authorities. He was an Armenian, and an evil-looking,
small, vicious brute with red bloodshot eyes, who inter-
fered with the wives of his neighbours. He gave
evidence against Moslem brigands, of whom he was in
terror, and worked hand in glove with the Christian
criminals. As they relied on dishonest interpreters, so
the British military authorities trusted in, gave power

168

THE RAID ON BAKAL KEUY 169

to and subsidized such evil beasts as Dipovan ; and so
they besmirched our good name.

The villagers desired to feast us, and we walked
through the deep forest of fine beeches and oaks> straight
and slim and seventy foot high, until we came to a
spring that had cut its way through black rocks down
in a shady valley. Some sultan had built it up with
marble, making a basin and calling it Tash Delen or the
“ Rock Cutter.’’ The water-carriers came to it to
draw the exquisite water and sold it in the thirsty streets
of Stambul.

There we lay in the shade on beds of leaves, with the
peasants ranged round us. Many of the types of the
Ottoman peasantry were there. There was the Head-
man, a great heavy dark Armenian, with a hoarse laugh
and a mouth full of black teeth, brutal faced and boister-
ous. He had been chief huntsman to Sultan Abdul
Hamid. His lean, rat-faced brother, who made bread
and sold groceries at a good profit in the village, was
there. They were both great drinkers of alcohol.
There were Greek and Armenian women, with their
husbands, chattering like starlings and wearing yards of
pleated bloomer trousers, little waistcoats over their
blouses and coloured handkerchiefs tied round their
masses of glorious hair. Many of them were good-
looking women, but they grow old and ugly quickly.
Spring here is short, and then comes summer with its-
buming suns that patches the land and air ; and in such
a climate women and flowers alike grow quickly, come
to their prime early, and then shrivel and pass.

There were Turks with great belts round their middles

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

170

full of pockets and layers in which they carried all their
trifles. On one side sat the Lazzes, blue-eyed, light-
haired men from the south coast of the Black Sea, where
it comes full in the force of the gales from the Crimea,
They talked in a sing-song, melodious and droning, each
sentence drawn out into an Oh ! ” and then carried
forward to the next. They were good sturdy stuff,
these peasants. The land, the air and the water were
good ; and yet a gang of half-caste Levantine rulers away
in Stambul had ruined all. They had murdered the
industrious Greek and Armenian and poured out to
waste the results of his labour. They had decimated
the lazy, lovable Turks.

Already the sun threw long shadows through the
trees. Below the spring, a nightingale, unable to wait
for night, burst into song. Far away a jackal cried, and
red-legged partridges called to each other on the hills.
The people were excited and full of good cheer and
singing. For a few hours the dread fear was off them,
and they were safe and might walk and sleep in safety
because my escort and I were there.

We crept away silently that night and across the hills,
till we came to the rendezvous. Yanni, still dressed as
a woman, was to be our guide and we followed his plans.
With heather to our waists, we staggered across the open
country, where my mare stumbled and slipped and
snorted and blew with fear at the steep hills. The pale
moon threw a faint purple mist across the world. It
died to a circle of soft white in the early grey of dawn,
as we came to the village. Yanni showed a genius for
this work, and, as dawn crept up the sky, I saw that

GREEK VILLAGERS SUSPECTED OF BRIGAN’DAGE OUTSIDE A
TYPICAL VILLAGE HOUSE

THE RAID ON BAKAL KEUY

171

we were all round the village and every gully and exit
that might lead up to it was closed with gendarmes.

We sat and waited for the light. I left the horses in
the valley and climbed a hill to watch. Suddenly
outside our ring I saw a man creeping through a field
of maize and then another and yet another. Then they
burst into full view miming hard. I blew the alarm.
The orders were to catch and, if possible, not to kill. In
a garden below the horses were being fed. Before they
were bridled up the men were 500 yards away among
the gullies at the foot of the great mountain of Keish
Dagh that leans over the village. Then came the
gendarmes riding hard and firing from the saddle as
they rode, and every gendarme on the hills let fly and
the air was full of the crack and drone of bullets.

Sidki was leading on his white stallion. With my
glasses I saw the men separate. Two ran up the hills
and one come doubling back down a gully, and as he
passed he fired at Sidki and man and horse went down,
with the horse hit. After him came Ali and Hussein.
The horses and the man ran neck and neck. The man
with great strides and slipping between the boulders,
round which the horses had to detour, running at an
incredible pace, drew away. I caught up a rifle and
raced to intercept him. My heavy field boots weighed
like lead. For a second I saw him clearly and then he
was hidden in a ravine ; and as he went over the sky-
line a quarter of a mile away I fired and saw the dust
kick up beside him, and he was gone.

It was Karaoglan, an immense gorilla of a man with
long arms and a tremendous chest and dark and hand-

172

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

some to look at. Months later he quarrelled with his
mistress and she betrayed him to us.

The gendarmes had caught the other two runners.
They were Christo and Nikola, members of the band.
We combed out the houses one by one, and found a
rifle or two, and three more brigands. I talked to the
headman. He threw out his hands in despair, and I
thought that I understood his position ; but in the next
month the Greeks discovered that Yanni was our helper,
and they boycotted and starved his wife and children,
till they became outcasts, and Yanni, who had been
released, disappeared and could not be found. All the
evidence showed that this headman and the little priest
had instigated the villagers to murder him.

Satisfied with our captures, we made a permanent
gendarme post in the village — and this at the request of
the headman and elders — and prepared to take the road
home. I waited impatiently for the horses to come.
As they did not appear I walked down to their stables.
From a distance I heard the voices of Sidki and Hadji
raised in high argument. Behind the stable I found a
crowd and Hadji’s stallion, which had a neck as thick
as its girth, rolling in the agony of colic. As they watched,
one would call Allah ! Allah ! ” and the crowd
would draw breath through their teeth as they sighed,
Sidki wished to dose the horse with brandy, but Hadji
held that it was forbidden and accursed, and he quoted
the Holy Laws to give force to his views ; for though
he could not read or write the old man knew by heart
great pieces of the Koran and the Sheriat,

Hadji,” I called, and he came to me, dignified and

THE RAID ON BAKAL KEUY

173

courteous. He was an Arab bom in Bagdad and a
devout Moslem, who neither drank alcohol nor smoked,
kept strictly the fast of Ramazan, and had twice, as a
poor pilgrim, done the Haj to Mecca.

“ Hadji, will you give him this ? I asked, offering
him a horse-pill. But he was still hot from his argu-
ment, and his gnarled swarthy face was fierce with the
fanaticism in him, that would carry him to murder.

“ No, no, Effendi, I know not what is in it. There
may be in it wine or pig-flesh,” he replied.

But Hadji,” I asked, if the doctors order it, would
you not yourself take medicine ? ”

“ The doctors,” he flared up, “ they are neither sheik
nor hodja. They read French-Mench and then talk
fon ! fon ! fon ! and fon ! again 1 I know the medicines
of the Koran, which are all-sufficing.”

Days later Hadji had a headache. It was so severe
that he swayed in the saddle half blind as he rode. All
his pride and self-sufficiency, as a follower of the Prophet,
was gone. At the night-halt he took my aspirin, and
was comforted, and henceforth carried a few tabloids in
a slip of paper. He was a good, faithful old man, for,
though he was months in arrears of pay and his coat was
all patches and his trousers threadbare and his toes
came through his riding-boots, he would neither steal
nor take bribes and he obeyed orders quietly and doggedly
and implicitly, and told no lies.

They were nothing but great foolish children, these
gendarmes of mine. They were thoughtless, illogical,
happy and as lovable as cMdren, and as cruel ; except
for here and there some town-bred rascal like Sidki.

174

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

We took the steep path that runs over the mountain
of Keish Dagh and clambered up between the stones,
until we came close below the crest. Here it is believed
that the priests at the coming of the Turks hid the
church-plate that they had collected, and over it rolled
a great stone.

We halted for a breather, and to look at the tremendous
view. Beneath us the valleys full of ripening com
twisted down between the scarred hills — hills covered
with heather and scmb and rock and the dead asphodel
flowers. For the rest, it was rolling waste and granite
hills with great red woimds across their sides and their
tops standing out ragged, like stale bread tom ; or
perhaps it was the place where the moon was rent away
from the earth. Valleys and hills dropped down to the
sea-shore, and the plain lay spread out like a map with
white roads and squared fields. As far as the eye could
see the shore was fringed with white villages and red-
roofed houses and gardens rich with trees — ^villages
and gardens built by Christians and inhabited by
Christians who crowded on to the shore for protection
against the wildness of the interior. Far away to the
north was the Alemdar forest and the distant glint of
the Black Sea. The Bosphoms wound down, a blue
streak between steep hills. Pera and Stambul stretched
away into the haze of the Thracian plains. The Marmora
was deep and blue, as far away as the Dardanelles and
back past us round the islands of the Princes and up to
Ismidt. While beyond it the mountains of Anatolia
towered into the blue sky, now pale with heat.

And so we clambered down the steep path through

THE RAID ON BAKAL KEUY

175

the fortified lines and barbed wire that the British had
made to defend Constantinople before the Greeks came,
and in the shadow of evening, at the hour of evening
prayer, we clattered into Skutari.

CHAPTER XX

As a Gendarme Supervising OiEcer

W EEK after week I travelled on horseback up
and down the country from the placid blue
Marmora to the trouWesome Black Sea. I,
like the other gendarmerie control officers in their own
areas, was following the instinct of our ancestors. We
were given certain limited powers to supervise the
gendarmes and to prevent malpractices. Very rapidly
we made for ourselves administrative powers. We
guided the collection of taxes. We saw to the admin-
istration of justice and the work of the forest guardians
and the headmen of the villages. We built the roads
and helped the people. It was a leap back to the instinct
of the great administrators in India and all across the
East, who had built new structures from ancient ruins,
who had brought justice and peace to where there had
been only injustice and brutality, and who had persuaded
once ferffie lands, which had become deserts, to produce
again com and food. This they had done by super-
imposing over the local administrations European ideas,
European ideals and European control.

In our small areas we succeeded. As we destroyed
the brigandage, the villagers gained confidence and

176

AS A GENDARME SUPERVISING OFFICER 177

returned to till their fields. It was impossible to reach
all the abuses in the administration of justice, but we
broke down the gross injustices. Fear ceased to be the
dominant attitude and order came slowly back out from
disorder. We were doing in our small areas what the
Treaty of Sevres, if it could be enforced, planned to do
for all Anatolia.

But it was a leap back to an old system . The Great War
that had been fought to end all wars, and the Graat Peace
that had been signed to end all peace, had made the system
archaic. England had lost, as well as her strength, her
instinct to rule. It had belonged to one class that,
poor but well educated, had filled the army and navy
and the civil services. It was the class that had made
and ruled the Empire, and it had been the schoolmaster
as well as the ruler of the East. It was gone, killed by
the Great War and crushed out by economic conditions.
Neither the rich nor the titled aristocrats nor Labour
had this instinct nor the inspiration, and England cared
no more for these things. In the East was a revolt
against Europe and its dominance and its persistent
assumption of superiority. Based on the treaty of
August 1919, the old system was tried in Persia. It
was the foundation of the administration of Irak. It
was the keynote of the Treaty of Sevres. One by one
each was swept into the dust-bin as rubbish and dried
meatless bones. Our work marked the final trial and
the passing of the old system and the refusal of the
Asiatic to accept good government at the hands of
European schoolmasters.

Gradually the gendarmes destroyed the brigand bands

N

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

178

and made the villages and roads safe. The small and
irregular bands were rapidly eliminated, but those that
were large and permanent were difficult to lay by the
heels. The eggs, from which they had hatched, had
been laid in the unpleasant manure heap of local politics
and Greek helped Greek and Turk helped Turk. To
the north was a Moslem band under one Tahir the Lazz
who had taken to the hills to fight the Greek troops and
so had gained the halo of a patriot. To the south,
where the Greek villages aboimded, Zaffiri and Pavli
and Karaoglan still roamed the country-side and made
spasmodic raids, and then went to ground among their
Greek friends.

I lived close with the people and I began to realize how
they looked on us. The Christians had been roused by the
promises of the Allied leaders at the Armistice, and still
failed to understand that these were not to be fulfilled.

The Turks without exception hated us. They are a
proud people, and were prouder than ever in defeat.
The British air of superiority drove them to fury, but,
forced to keep it pent up, they raged inwardly, and
their hatred became as full of bitter poison as an unlanced
boil. They were incommunicative people with no
power of self-expression nor of propaganda in their own
interests, and British officials failed to realize that they
were a ruling people and not Hindus or negroes to be
treated as subjects. It was only a few years since they
had possessed a great empire.

‘‘ It may be,” said one during an argument, that
the British make one prosperous, but they do not respect
one’s dignity,” and he spat expressively.

AS A GENDARME SUPERVISING OFFICER 179

The stupidity of many senior officers would have been
amusing, if it had not been tragic. One Colonel came
inspecting and grew very savage and caustic, because
the gendarmes had not spotless buttons on their tattered
uniforms. In the course of one day he tried to tell
some excellent troops that he would not be ashamed to
command them, and explained nicely to the Governor
that he fully realized that his pay was in arrears and
therefore he recognized that he and his staff, like all
Turkish officials, had to be dishonest. He treated the
headmen of the villages as if they were his grooms, and
he treated his grooms like dogs. And this Colonel was
no exception among senior officers. It is a vast pity
that each regiment, like kings in the olden days, has
no professional fool who might by his frank irony force
senior officers to keep a sense of the value of their own
importance and their own unimportance.

As I lived on friendly terms with them, the Turks
allowed me the doubtful privilege of seeing behind
their minds. I heard the scurrilous things they said
and believed of our women. They disliked our methods.
They did not believe in either our intentions or our
promises. As they go through life with closed eyes, so
here the British officials imagined that if they brought
riches and peace and justice to the people they would
be beloved. They never realized the outstanding fact
that the people of Turkey, as those of Irak and Persia,
prefer the most scandalous Moslem government to the
very best that is foreign and Christian.

i8o

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

§

"‘We have worked enough,” said Husein Husni, the
Captain and the senior ofEcer in my area. “ Let us
amuse ourselves to-night. Hilmi the Advocate will lend
us his house. I have persuaded Blanche the Dancer to
come and a man has gone to hire a dozen of the Sultan’s
best players from the palace band.”

Husein Husni was a good companion for amusement.
Fat, so that except on state occasions the high collar of
his uniform and his belt had to stand open, with rough
tumbled hair and his fez stuck well back on his head,
he had that quality so often possessed by little fat men
that wheresoever he went the air became full of rib-
tickling laughter. The tales of his frequent amours
were the jests of the town, and, when his name was
mentioned, even the dullest crowd began to laugh and
be gay.

Yet to judge Husein Husni as a fat and pleasant
philanderer would be luijust. He hated the routine of
office life, but at the first news of brigands he Was up
and out with a gun across his shoulders and skin shoes
to replace his everyday foppish French-cut boots. Away
over the hills he would outwalk the youngest. He had
a flair for catching brigands and criminals. He was a
bom leader, able to get willing work out of unpaid men.
He took no bribes and was as proud as Lucifer.

After nightfall we drove in a broken-down carriage
to the little house that stood in a concealed square
looking on to a courtyard of an old mosque. With us
came the new Governor of the district, Sami Bey, fault-
lessly dressed in the full regalia of an Ottoman high

AS A GENDARME SUPERVISING OFFICER i8i

official with frock-coat, patent-leather shoes and new
red fez complete. He belonged to the new order, was
a Nationalist by sentiment, had been a deputy in the
Parliament, a governor of a province under the Angora
administration, quarrelled with Mustapha Kemal and
come to Constantinople for safety. He had the drive
of a Manchester business man, working long hours and
making his decisions quickly. He had reorganized the
district, harried the lazy officials who had slouched along
under the flabby old toad who had been the Sultanas
nominee, and he was rapidly producing order and
prosperity. He belied nearly all the current conceptions
of an Ottoman official.

Hilmi the advocate — advocate ’’ was a euphemism
for general odd-job dirty-work agent — opened the door
to us with deep humility and we trooped across the stone
kitchen, up die stairs and into a large room. Along
one wall and across the windows was a cushioned settee.
There were straight-backed chairs and little tables set
with small glasses and bottles of rakhiy a heady edition
of absinthe flavoured with aniseed, and with them plates
of dried fish, and olives and beans and many hors d^omvres
in oil. The walls were bare and white-washed. The
musicians trooped in and salaamed and squatted by the
wall. We smoked and drank and nibbled at the
“ mezzars,^^ as the Turks call these hors oeuvres ^ until
suddenly without warning a musician struck up, and
the rest joined in or left off as they felt inclined.

Weird sounds were piled on weird sounds that seem
to a western ear to be neither tones nor semi-tones nor
yet quarter-tones, but to fail to catch any note. The

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

i8a

hand drums beat incessantly. The clarinets squealed
like bagpipes and the violins were scraped and sawed
not in the melody but as a vamp accompaniment. Then
one and then another of the singers would burst into
the agony of an ear-splitting wail, hang on to a note till
he would appear to be near suffocation, and then with a
quaver and a run strike another and so gradually strain
his way through the hundred verses of some passionate
love song.

Guests slipped in respectfully and salaamed and took
seats. Among them came a wizened old merchant who
owned a dozen grocer shops and was rich. He was so
stupidly enamoured of Blanche that he pursued her
continually and she bled the old fool of his money. A
little hodja followed him half apologetically, but, seeing
the governor, plucked up courage and accepted the rdkhi
offered to him. Soon he became excited and his tongue
rolled in indecencies.

The air in the room grew thick with tobacco smoke
and drink-laden breath. The music grew wilder.
Husni and the governor were flicking their fingers to
the time and swaying their bodies and beating with their
feet and now and again would wail with the singers and
cry “ Allah ! Allah ! ” as if they were tom by the agony
of love.

And I sat silent, for I could not understand. All this
wild confusion of noises meant nothing to me. I could
not enter into the excitement nor feel the agony. When
suddenly the door opened and with a musical little
whoop came Blanche the Dancer.

She was a great artist. When she danced with her

AS A GENDARME SUPERVISING OFFICER 183

feet, her steps were as dainty as a child playing in the
snn. She danced the wild highland dances of Anatolia
with a sword in her hand and the guests went wild and
beat on the floor till the room rocked, and the poor old
fool of a merchant tried to dance too and fell down
in a comer. Then she sang and danced a love song,
and in her little body, her hips as pliant as young twigs
in the wind and her long arms rippling like snakes, she
was desire and the call of the flesh and the warmth of
woman. The room became tense with desire.

She was no common woman this. A Greek by birth,
she was the darling of Stambul. Two officers had
committed suicide for love of her. She could play on
all the primitive passions, whether she called to their
patriotism in a marching song, or their madness in a
dance, or to love and lust with the look under her eyes
that was like a heaped-up furnace, and with the sway
of her body and the lure of her voice. I had ceased to
be a stranger sitting alone and cold. With her art she
had bridged the great gulf between us. For a minute
the jarring discords were gone and I felt the soul of the
music. Now I half imderstood.

Across the heavy atmosphere of the room I could see
the little hodja^ with his fez and its green turban stuck
on the back of his shaven head, and his quaint apple-
like face wrinkled up with laughter.

Yahoo ! ” he called, looking eagerly at Blanche as
she stood with her exquisite figure in a tight bodice
silhouetted against a lamp. “ Yahoo ! we surely have
here a ‘ stealer of oranges.’ ”

But Blanche was talking eagerly to the old merchant

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

184

as he sat dizzily in a chair. He had promised to sell her
a shop and they called me as witness'; and when later
I found that she had got it at half price I held the old fool
to his bond for his folly.

Then all the room began to tell scandalous stories to
each other of their neighbours’ wives and their own
successes ; and the drink loosened the tongue of Sami
the Governor, so that he forgot his high rank and
exchanged stories with Husni and both became foul-
mouthed. The musicians caught the atmosphere and
played again wildly and the merchant would dance, and
fell down, and they carried him away to sleep on the
stone floor of the kitchen. Restraint was gone and as
Blanche danced, the room swayed and sighed and beat
time, for now she danced with such a quality, as would
have set a nuimery doing steps.

Suddenly in the doorway peering through the haze of
smoke, with a look of intense disgust on his weather-
beaten old face, stood Hadji Ramazan. In a second the
foolery was out of Husni, and he went out with him to
the kitchen beyond.

There was news, Tahir the Lazz had taken a fat
Albanian from behind the village of Mahmud Shevket
Pasha and the news was but two hours old. Usually
word came days late by devious means. Izzet was a
rich man and very fat and lame and, even if they beat
him, the brigands could not hope to get far.

We were away at once. I felt Blanche’s shoulder by
me in the dark kitchen, with a whispered invitation to
come to her and in my hand a slip of paper with an
address. I found that I was to help a relative of hers

AS A GENDARME SUPERVISING OFFICER 185

who was in jail. We stepped over the sleeping merchant
and out into the cool night, glad to be away from the
smoke of tobacco and the stench of spilt alcohol and
stale food in oil. Hadji had anticipated orders and the
mounted gendarmes were saddling up. My sleepy
groom fumbled in the dark with the mare’s bridle.
Already, as we rode into the cool still night, the debauch
was far behind us.

CHAPTER XXI

Brigand Hunting : The Death of Tahir
The Lazz

W E took the road that runs north along the
Bosphorus shore. Sometimes it was broad
and good, and then it would become a mere
alley-way, twisting through little villages. Save for the
clatter of hoofs, the occasional stumble of a horse on
a loose flint and the subdued curses of its rider, we
rode silently in the lead-coloured hours that drag slowly
at the end of night. The villages were buried in sleep.
At the sound of our clatter a watchman would beat on
the stones with his heavy musical pole and another
would reply, and they would call to each other across
the silent black world, and say that all was well. Here
and there a dog barked, and some cock, thinking the
dawn was come, would crow.

We came to the village of Beicos, which the Nationa-
lists had raided in 1920 and from where they had fired
on the fleet. The Embassy was a mile across the black
water. The fleet lay at anchor below us and, as ever,
the ships were talking to each other with sparks of light
from the mast-heads. Turning in shore we climbed
the steep road that clears the hills, through low scrub

186

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 187

forest where the gendarmes carried their rifles ready on
the saddle, and so we came to the crest. With a last
look back at the Bosphorus where in the clear black
night it gleamed sable and caught the soft light of the
myriad stars dusted across the sky, we descended and
rode rapidly inland.

We came to Mahmud Shevket Pasha, a Greek village
that lay among steep hills with a river running between
the houses and a great open square full of ancient chest-
nut trees. The houses were empty and many in ruins.
Only a few villagers had come back to reap the crops.
The head man, Constanides, hobbled down to meet us
and take us to his house. He was an old man with
a twisted back and red bloodshot eyes that watered and
showed the insides of the lower lids. His coat and
trousers were of rough local weaving and his shoes were
of heavy leather and soled with wood. As an autocrat
he had ruled this village for many a long day and endea-
voured to save it from disaster by steering clear of the
rocks of politics.

We found in the house his wife and daughters, terrified
by the night’s brigandage. There was a son there who
was a waiter in Pera and with his broken English, his
xmpleasant European imitation of clothes and manners,
his oily vulgarity and his breath full of the stench of
garlic, he represented all that I hated in the Levan-
tine.

Husni had gone to collect the evidence, and while I
sat with the headman, the old asthmatic priest of the
village came to see us. His long beard was dirty and
discoloured. He brought with him a young priest who

i88

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

•was a tall, fierce fanatical fellow with a red light and a
roving look in his eye and a nervous maimer.

“ Three times,” said the old headman, holding out
his hands in despair, “ three times have we left the
village and gone down into the city for safety and now
we must go again, for we are frightened. In the war
the Government told us to go. They made this a centre
of a division, and the soldiers broke the houses. Last
year Greek brigands raped my two daughters, and the
ravishers live still in their village and are safe. This
year Turkish brigands have driven away all our cattle ;
and this night they stole Izzet, the Albanian, as he
went home do'wn the road to his farm. We never sleep.
If a dog barks, we men rise and creep to the window
to see the danger, while the women lie huddled on
the floor. We smoke a cigarette under the hand, and
watch from the window saying ‘ They come ! ’ but
who comes we know not, and so once more, until again
the dogs bark, we lie down.”

“ Ah,” sighed the old priest, “ May God give us back
the good old days of Abdul Hamid.”

The younger man leant over towards me, oily and
insinuating. “ We pray,” he said, “ each day in the
church for Lloyd George and the coming of the English.”

The Head Man looked cautiously round. There was
fear in their eyes.

§

The scouts said that the brigands had gone north
and, as soon as horses and men were fed, we saddled
up and were away. Looking back at the village I saw

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 189

how, with a thousand others, it had been caught in
the storm of the Nations and the maelstrom of Nationa-
lism and been dashed to pieces as a poor weak wreck.
The villagers wanted peace to collect their com and
fruit and to sit in the cafe and talk. But, ignorant of
the needs and the objects and the potentialities of each
other, that oily wild young priest and his kind had joined
hands with Lloyd George, and hundreds of thousands
of innocent villagers had to suffer the useless pangs of
Hell.

We followed the Riwa river as it raced over rocks
between the hills and then out into a broad valley full
of hay until we came to the Black Sea, where the north
wind had filled the river-mouth with sand and we could
ford across.

The brigands were not far ahead of us. They had
gone south-east so that we left the sea-shore and made
across the woods and towards night came to Polonnez
Keuy. It was a village of Poles who had come as
refugees from Russian oppression and been given this
land by some sultan. Round us were deep woods and
in these were the brigands. By now from every gen-
darme post the infantry had marched and made a cordon
round the woods, so that no bread should come through
to those we chased. As the people saw us, they plucked
up coinage and here and there came news that Tahir
the Lazz and his men had passed some point at such
and such an hour. As long as they held Izzet to ran-
som, the brigands could not break and scatter.

We made Polonnez Keuy our centre. Its people
were but a poor^third-rate type that in European coun-

TXJRKEY IN TRAVAIL

190

tries lives in the slums of great cities. But even they,
with a little work and a little ingenuity, had turned
their ground into a paradise. The fields were fenced
and full of orchards and rich com, and the gardens
were full of flowers. It was a lesson. It showed what,
in skilled sympathetic hands, Anatolia might become ;
for it bore richly even for these folk.

We lived well, as there were chickens and ducks, as
well as pigs that grunted and rooted round and even
through the houses. Hadji was in despair. He wished
to shoot all the pigs and their litters. He spat exten-
sively at the sight of them and would not even use
the word “ pig.”

This led to a long argument between us, for Hadji
had great hopes that one day he would convert me
and, being a privileged old man, he impressed on me
the foulness of eating pig-flesh.” And I, being in an
argumentative mood, suggested that we should go pig-
shooting and sell the flesh to the Christians and use
the skins for shoes and the money to buy more food
for the gendarmes. But Hadji would have none of it.
He said that pig-skin must not be close to man’s flesh
and that “ pig-money ” was accursed. And so we
argued for many weeks, till Husein Husni called three
hodjas to the Yeni Mosque of Skutari. There I, the
Giaour and ‘‘ the ** Unbeliever,” and Hadji Ramazan
the Chaoush, argued on a winter’s afternoon. But the
hodjas being polite, and moreover being ignorant, gave
answers that were inconclusive, except one who said
that the eating of pig-flesh destroyed sexual jealousy
and noade men lax and careless of their womenfolk.

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 191

§

At last we located Tahir the Lazz in the hills behind
Bozhane and so we took horse and made for the village.

Eliaiml the Muktar^ the Headman, a typical, straight-
set-np old Turk, met us and invited us with great dignity
and much ceremony to sit with him under a shady
tree by the village cafe. One by one the elders and
householders came to talk, and as each arrived he
salaamed in turn to each man present, sat down to rise
again and salaam once more to all in turn in full and
dignified humility. They were fine old aristocrats, th^e
villagers, and Kiamil made a fitting headman. He sat
in state against a tree-trunk. His eye was clean and
his manner proud. His white hair under his fez was
cropped close to the skull. High cheek-bones and an
aquiline nose, together with a week’s growth of beard
and a long moustache, gave him a fierce look. His
manner of walking and speaking was almost regal. He
wore the peasant clothes of wood-soled black shoes,
rough woollen socks, blue trousers that came to his
knee and had a pleated seat, a coloured collarless shirt
buttoned at the neck and wrists. A richly embroidered
jacket was flung round his shoulders. Roxmd his middle
was the great belt which Turks wear and which is full
of wonderful layers, whence come tobacco and cigarette
papers, snuff in a metal box, matches, a knife, money
and a hundred vital necessities of life.

He was an enterprising old gentleman, this muktar^
and kept open house for brigands and gendarmes alike
and so escaped both raids and fines. Luck had saved
the village from Greeks’ depredations. He had known

192

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Tahir as a youth and I begged him to advise the brigand
to surrender. I gave him a letter containing a pardon
for Tahir, if within two days he would come in with
his band and bring Izzet with him. He was not charged
with murder, but with attacking Greek troops, collect-
ing money and living free at the expense of the villages,
and with the ransoming of a few people. As always,
the actions of the Turkish brigands were mild in com-
parison with the brutalities, murders and crimes of the
Greeks.

My letter was passed from hand to hand, and I waited
at Bozhane for the result. We sat mostly by the coffee-
house and smoked and sipped black coffee. Below us
the green ran down to a tributary of the Riwa river.
On the bank men were building a rough primitive sea-
boat, such as Noah might have put together.

They were deadly dull, these Turks. I looked at
the circle of men facing me, as they sat in silence on
low cane-bottomed stools without backs. They were
devilish dull people. Fundamental differences of ideas,
no doubt, made a gap between us. Pictures and art
are forbidden by the Koran and the only sense of the
artistic that the Turks, as a whole, possess is that of
looking at beautiful scenery. Fatalism produces placidity,
but not amusement. Beyond talking in the coffee-
house, they have no pastimes nor sports. But above
all the complete cutting out of women from public and
social life produces the flatness as of living for ever in
a men’s club.

There was no spring and joy in the life. The houses
were silent and blind, doors shut and windows with

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 193

lattices. There was no calling of woman to woman
nor laughter nor even talk, except where the children
played on the green and the old men were courteous
to me. Occasionally a door opened and a figure in
black with a pitcher in its hand would come out, close
the door quickly behind it, draw the black cloth even
closer across its face leaving one eye to see, and pass
us in the sunlight like a black ghost. Not a man looked,
nor dared I, for nearly every crime committed by a
Turk has a woman mixed in it. These were their
women. They could neither read nor write, nor could
they have any interests. They were the dull mothers
of dull sons.

I was interested to know what sort of school they
had, for a fine imposing mosque stood half hidden
behind some trees. They told me that there was a
mixed school to which the girls went till they were
seven.

‘‘ And after that,” I asked the Muhtar ^ “ where are
they taught ? ”

“ They are not taught any more,” he replied.

“ Then they cannot read or write ? ” I queried.

“ I see no reason why they should,” he replied.
“ Why should the women write except to send love-
letters ? ” And all the elders and the rat-like priest with
a green turban round his fez nodded their agreement.
The priest began an exposition on the subject when
the Muhtar cut in and bade him go about his business.

The Turks have neglected their women as an educa-
tional force, and herein lies the main cause of their
failure. Their national characteristics have not helped

o

194

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

them to stave off the failure. They are lazy and passive
and make no provision for to-morrow, but leave it for
God to provide. They have carried their nomad habits
into a stationary life and hence have the same lack of
stability that is a marked characteristic of the nomad
life of the British ruling class in India. As all the people
of the Near East, they lack the power of sustained action.
The ordinary humdrum routine of life has no interest
for them ; but, as they have again and again shown in
their history, in the moment of utter defeat and despair
they will gird up their loins and do great things.

And in this Islam has aided the national character.
For Islam can raise barbarians at a bound to great
heights and rouse the sluggard to brilliant enthusiasm,
but it cannot sustain them. It has always meant war
and force. It has brutalized and degraded again those
it has raised. It has shut out from life the softening
influence of cultured women and it has failed to create
among its women ideals and aspirations and the ability
to pass them to their children.

But Islam is a great force in the lives of the Turks.
It is intensely human and it enters into the personal
detail of each man’s life. It decides his hygiene and
his eating and his habits. It is full of common sense
and rules for his health. The actions of the daily
prayers are gymnastic exercises, that will cure an over-
filled stomach. Because Islam is a real part of their
lives the Moslems profess it openly and pray in public
without embarrassment. It has been blamed for keep-
ing women shut up and veiled and so debasing them
to the level of anim^. The Koran contains no authority

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 195

for the Moslem attitude to their women. It does not
even enjoin that they shall veil their faces. Centuries
ago in Central Asia, and its origin even then hidden
in the mists of antiquity, there was a fear that the Devil
could whisper in the ears of women and produce abortion,
and so women went with their ears covered which meant
their hair too. The fear became a superstition and died,
but the instinct to cover their hair remained. It was
ordered by St. Paul on Christians, that the angels might
not be carnally minded. While many Moslems, with
their animal jealousy, increased it to the veiling of the
whole face.

I looked round at the men in front of me, as I had
looked all across Anatolia, for the “ Terrible Turk ”
who had terrified our ancestors and set Europe by the
ears ; for the men who had stormed at the gates of
Vienna, had laid waste Buda-Pest, and massacred Bul-
garians and Armenians ; for the people whose sovereign
had treated the kings of France and England as dirt,
and at last deigned to call them the ‘‘ Brothers of my
Grand Vizier.” I found quiet, placid people, mild and
gentle and excellent hosts, dignified yet courteous in
deference. I found them dignified and courtly, but with
the dignity of the race of rulers mixed thick with contempt
for the ruled.

I saw now that these were still the “ Terrible Turks.”
They were very dull and ignorant. They had no initia-
tive. They desire to be ruled and directed. Left alone
to go their own way, they were lost. I have seen sheep
in a flock bravely face a clanging tram in a crowded
street, but a sheep alone, away from all danger, is a

196 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

terror-stricken creature. These Turks had great mass
bravery and discipline, but as units they were pitiable.
Disease had done them no good. Defeat had done them
great harm, but yet they were still, as a whole, simple,
sturdy folk, abstemious in their habits. They followed
custom and obeyed orders and for the rest sat in the
sun and — I was going to say “ think ” — ^but they don’t
even do that.

“ Fine animals,” I said once to Colonel T. E. Law-
rence, from Arabia.

“ Fine vegetables,” he replied.

They have formed, and still form, magnificent material
for troops that must fight shoulder to shoulder. They
form the material out of which an absolute autocracy
can be built.

The history of Turkey is the history of a few great
men, and then the history of a string of bad ones. A
few great Sultans and some Grand Viziers made the
Empire. As soon as the Sultans failed, so the Empire
crumbled. Whatever terrible deed or brave assault Aey
were ordered to achieve these Turks and their ancestors
did them in the same solid absolute way of implicit
obedience. It was a spring day when the instructions
to massacre came to Angora in 1916. The orders were
to be^ at simrise on Monday and to finish at sunset
on Wednesday. No Christian was touched till Monday.
Then they were marched to death, clubbed over the
head, drowned, himg and raped. Any who escaped
were as safe on Thursday morning as if there had been
no massacre.

But these qualities of the Turks are those that can

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 197

be most easily exploited, and they have been exploited.
Their absolute obedience, due to their natural desire
to be controlled and directed, and their blind, unreason-
ing loyalty has placed them in the hands of their rulers
or of any military adventurer who has had the will-
power and brains to arrive.

I lodged the night with Kiamil the Muktar. We
had early in the afternoon exhausted all possible topics
of conversation. Politics were left alone, for what sen-
sible man would discuss politics with a stranger ? Women
were taboo, and so also was religion. Farming was a
possibility, but when it had been said that the com
was good and the barley bad, it was finished. We
talked of the air and the water of the village for some
time, and then conversation faded away to odd remarks
and the rolling and smoking of innumerable cigarettes.

Supper was brought in and after we had eaten we
belched luxuriously to show our breeding and smoked
again. I was living the real life of a Turk, When I
yawned they brought me in a mattress, two hard bolsters
for pillows, and a coverlet, and left me to myself. I
wanted to read and write but there was no table. Chairs
were replaced by a long wooden settee fixed under the
windows. The lamp was a little cheap affair that just
turned darkness into gloaming. There is no place nor
arrangement among Turks whether rich or poor for
such things as reading. In their lives there is no going
away alone to do these things. They talk, they smoke,
they drink coffee and eat their meals. At times they
pray and sometimes work, but all these things they do
in company.

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

198

Failing all else, I lay down to sleep. The mattress
was full of knotty bits where the cotton had bunched
up and needed beating out. The floor was single and
between the planks were great crevices. Below was a
stable and a cow-shed. The smell of manure and mud
knee-deep came up through the cracks. A cow rattled
its chain, as it turned or lay down to sleep, and another
blew heavily and chewed. In anticipation I had put
down all round me a barrage of Keating’s Powder, but
the bugs and fleas came through it undaunted. Some-
where in the village they were celebrating a wedding.
The beat of hand-drums and long-drawn-out nasal voices
just missing all keys came up with the grunts and shouts
of people dancing.

I slept restlessly in the early morning and was roused
by the sound of milking in the stable below and the
gusts of wind that blew up between the cracks in the
floor as the stable door was opened.

I wanted to get up and go out but each time I opened
the door I heard the rustle of hurrying skirts and the
whispering of women. So, perforce, I stayed where I
was. When the sun was well up, a man brought a
long-necked iron jug, a piece of soap and a towel and
poured water on my hands. With this I rubbed out
my eyes and washed my hands. For cleaning the
back of one’s ears or one’s neck there was no arrange-
ment. Getting up is a simple process. There are
no Muller’s exercises, no cold bath and massage, no
brushing of hair and teeth and soaping luxuriously.
It takes one motion to pull on one’s trousers — ^for the
world sleeps in all its underclothes — ^another to slip on

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 199

one’s coat, a third to put on one’s fez, and the complete
man is ready for his morning coffee. Later he may
wash his face or his neck or he may not. That is optional.
On Thursday a shave and a Turkish bath complete his
hygiene, but they also appear to be optional.

§

Tahir had sent his reply in a neat phrased letter of
an educated man. He refused my offer, said he was
a patriot, and would rather die than come in. So we
prepared to get to horse and find him. They brought
me milk, white cheese, eggs and bread, and then we
prepared to leave. The correct phrases of coining and
going and their replies with all the formalities of sitting
down, getting up, smoking and asking as to health would
fill a book, and he who knows these thoroughly, knows
half the Turkish language, and might travel from Con-
stantinople to Erzerum and say no more and yet live in
comfort.

On the village green we found a crowd, for there was
Abdullah, the Chaoush, a member of Tahir’s band, and
eight of his companions who were tired of being chased
and had come to surrender and obtain the pardon I
had promised. They brought with them (as a peace-
offering) Izzet the Albaman, thinner but unhurt.
Brigandage had ceased to be a pleasant game, and its
profits were now small.

In gratitude for his release, Izzet, who was both rich
and miserly, gave to each of his rescuers one three-
penny packet of tobacco. He had made them lavish
promises and I expostulated with him, but in vain, and

200

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

so we marked up a score against Izzet. Months later
we went sixty strong to his farm and there by the laws
of hospitality he had to feed us. We ate his eggs and
chickens and drank his milk imtil he had paid a heavy
price for his meanness to Abdullah the Brigand.

Now with Abdullah and his men as guides we set
out to be finished with Tahir and his band. In all
the villages were gendarme posts so that it was hard
for him to come by food. We took hostages from all
Moslem villages that might help him. We sent out
three bodies of picked men to scour through the forest
and hills continually. Again and again we were close
behind him, and always he escaped us. Our critics
began to say that, while we were quick to catch Christians,
Moslem brigands slipped easily through our limp fingers.

I had come back to Polonnez Keuy tired and weary
from a long trek, when Sidki burst in on me without
ceremony and his black eyes all afire.

“ Tahir the Lazz is dead ! ’’ he said. Sidki was
always full of wild stories, if they could bring him any
credit, and I was sore and irritable.

‘‘ How do you know ? ” I asked.

** Because,’’ he replied, “ Tewfik who was second in
the band to Tahir is here, and with him the rest of
the band, and he says that he shot Tahir in the hills
above Eumerli.”

They brought Tewfik, the son of Osman, in to me,
for Husein Husni the Captain was still out on the
hills. He was a small rat of a man with a stoop and
a long bedraggled moustache, that half covered a mouth
full of foul teeth.

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 201

“ I shot Tahir the Lazz,” he said in reply to my
question.

“ It is a lie,” I bawled ; “ you come here because
you are tired of being a brigand and a chief, and you
would earn the reward as well”

He threw out his hands deprecatingly. ‘‘ Your Excel-
lency may see for yourself, for Tahir lies on the hill
above the village of Eumerli.”

“ Hadji,” I called, “ they say that Tahir is dead and
Tewfik shot him.”

“ I have heard it, Effendi,” he replied. ‘‘ It is strange
that Moslems should shoot Moslems, when there are
Christians to be found.”

“ Hadji,” I continued, for he meant no insult to me
but rather a compliment, “ warn Husein Husni, the
Captain, and the doctor to meet me at the Village of
the Lazzes and have all ready, for we shall march one
hour before dawn to find Tahir the Lazz.”

“ Inshallahy by the grace of God,” he replied, and
I foolishly in irritation repeated :

“ Hadji, we shall — we march before dawn,”

and he solemnly replied :

“ By the grace of God, Inshallahy Effendi ! ”

We were away well up to time, and I bade Tewfik
ride close to me and tell me his story. He told me
how he and Tahir had taken to the hills to fight the
Greeks, and so had been outlawed by the British and
forced to live by brigandage. He told how the gendarmes
had made this life impossible, and how existence had
become precarious, “ for,” he said, ‘‘ the chase was hot
behind us, and my soul hated this life of a wild dog.

202

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Then your letter came and we wished to surrender, but
Tahir would have none of it and called us weaklings.
Then we were hunted again, and we determined to be
done with it.

Yesterday in the afternoon Tahir went to the spring
to drink and left his rifle with me,” he continued, raising
his voice that all might hear, for he was plainly proud
of his treachery, and I felt the gendarmes press in close
on their horses to hear the story.

“ Then I and Jemil took the cartridges from his rifle,
and when he returned I spoke to him more roughly
and said that we had all to gain and nothing to lose
by surrender. But he cursed me for a coward and a
traitor and declared that he would never surrender to
be put in prison and he threatened me with his rifle.
In his rage he had not looked to see if it was loaded.
Then I fired all my five cartridges into him and we left
.him dead and came down and surrendered.”

As he finished his story I heard the gendarmes sigh
and rein back their horses.

We came to the Village of the Lazzes set deep in
the forest and there found Husein Husni and the doctor
and the brother and wife of Tahir, and, after we had
eaten, we set out again taking them with us to identify
the body.

Tewfik led the way. We climbed up through the
forest by steep little paths, where the branches beat into
the rider’s face. We came out under pine-trees where
the sand gave way and the pine-needles made the going
slippery, so that the mare picked up her steps warily.
We climbed by twisted mountain paths, over rocks, and

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 203

through undergrowth, where we could see but a few
yards, and the gendarmes carried their rifles ready across
the saddle. Then we topped a sudden rise beneath
tall trees and came into a little glade.

Far below us mile upon mile the tree-tops extended
down the rolling hills. The hills were scarred, weather-
beaten and tom ; with here and there a tiny field broken
out of their gaunt sides. Hills and valleys twisted down
to the plain and the Sea of Marmora, which lay a rich
deep blue in the autumn light. Its shores were fringed
with villages of white villas with red roofs and gardens
full of trees. The Islands of the Princes were glowing
hotly in the evening sun. A ship from the Dardanelles
cut her way up across the placid sea, and left a long
trail of white behind her. Far in the background, their
feet shrouded in mist, the Anatolian hills stood massive
and threatening to the sky.

Tahir the Lazz was there in the glade. The doctor
bent over him. He called the wife to him. She lifted
her thick veil to look, and the brother came and answered
the doctor’s questions. Then they squatted down. The
woman wailed softly behind her veil. The man was
silent. The woman would have touched her husband’s
hands, but the wolves and the jackals had found him in
the night and made that impossible.

In the shade farther up the hill sat Tewfik son of
Osman with a look of pride on his face. He rolled a
cigarette and nibbled the edge of the paper with his
discoloured teeth before he licked and stuck it. He
said something to Sidki who lounged beside him, and
they laughed together, and looked at the woman with

204

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

lust in their eyes, I felt a sense of anger at his evil
gloating. A bird called to its mate and flitted across
the glade. A blackbird scolded. The evening sun was
throwing long shadows. The spring laughed with life,
as it broke out of the hill and went gurgling down into
the darkness of the forest. A nightingale caught its
breath and burst into song. Lower down the gendarmes
were feeding their horses and smoking. With a look at
the sun to see the time and the direction, Hadji Rama-
zan spread his little carpet and, turning towards Mecca,
recited the evening prayer. A stallion below squealed
with pure devilment.

As I turned down the hill with the doctor I heard
the men scratching a hole to hide Tahir from the flies
and the jungle. My heart was heavy. I was startled
by the crack of a rifle. The doctor assured me it was
some careless mistake. In the valley Hadji caught us.
He was leading his stallion down the steep slope, with
his rifle slung over his shoulder. Driven by impulse, I
put my hand on the muzzle. It was hot. Hadji looked
at me straight with a steady eye. It bade me beware
and not interfere in private matters. “ And Tewfik
comes ? ” I asked.

“ He has gone to his own, Effendim. They are digging
a second grave,’^ he replied.

“ He tried to escape,’’ interposed Sidki the Liar, and
broke off as he caught the laughter in my eyes.

We slept that night at Alemdar to the south. Next
day we started away early for Skutari, but already the
sun was up hot and fierce as we left the cool shade of
the woods and crossed the rolling empty hills that lie

THE DEATH OF TAHIR THE LAZZ 205

behind the Bosphorus. Once there had been trees here
also and shady oaks, but the Turks cut down all trees,
and leave barren empty spaces in their place. Through-
out this area there was hardly a bird or a shrub except
round some village.

It was sunset as we clambered up the last hill and
over the top. The dusk was settling in the valleys and
over the Bosphorus. From all the mosques below in
Skutari and in the city came up the call to prayer, God
is Great.” As we came down, the clouds glowed hot,
where the sun had sunk behind the minarets of the
mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent. As I slipped
stiffly from my tired mare in the square of the gendar-
merie barracks below us the himdred thousand lights
of ships on the Bosphorus and of houses and streets
began to twinkle in the dark.

CHAPTER XXII

The Greco-Turkish War : The Summer
Offensive on Angora, 1921

B etween our area and the rest of Anatolia,

I laid down as a frontier by the Allied High
Commissioners, was an imaginary line. It
was a frontier only on paper. It had no guards or
soldiers on it, because there were none to put there.
To the Turks who lived on both sides of it it meant
nothing, because the whole was Turkey. For the
minute the Greeks and the Turks respected this frontier.
They were both fully engaged with the other, and had
no desire to be embroiled with the Allies as well.

= Anatolia had become a vast camp. The Turks were
straining every muscle as they organized and developed
a fighting force. The Greeks spent April, May and
June of 1921 shipping over guns and men and stores,
and preparing to make their second big push, and so
bring the war to a close. To both the combatants
from England, France, Italy and America were shipped
large consignments of stores, clothing, arms and ammuni-
tion, and all that soldiers require to kill each other.
The merchants of Allied nationalities, sometimes sub-
sidized by their Governments, bought up surplus stocks

206

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

207

of war material and did good trade with the combatants.
Here and there I was surprised to find Ottoman Greeks
selling boots to Angora. Cynicism often lies lightly
on men in great places. The Allied Powers, who had
fought the Great War “ to end all war ” and who had
formed the League of Nations, proclaimed publicly
that, as they were neutral, their nationals were at liberty
to supply war stores to the combatants. In these cir-
cumstances it was a piece of cynicism almost unparalleled.

In June the British offered to mediate, and the Greeks
refused. They have been harshly criticized for this.
Such criticism is unjustified. The Greeks at the insti-
gation of the Allies had put their finger into the sausage-
machine and slowly it ground them all through to sausage.
They could not extract themselves without immediate
amputation and disaster. King Constantine and his
followers were the heirs of M. Venizelos, and the legacy
that they had received was not one to be envied. M.
Venizelos had calculated as the basis of his policy the
facts that the Allies were behind him and that the Allies
were almighty. But now they were not almighty and,
with the exception of the British, they had become
actively hostile. To consolidate his own position,
King Constantine had to go forward for a great military
victory. All the resources of Greece had been thrown
into Anatolia and to withdraw now meant ruin, bank-
ruptcy, dishonour and revolution. He was forced
pi^essly to go forward in the hopes of winning a success
out of the misty future.

On the loth of July the Greeks advanced in their
great summer offensive. They hurled the Turks back

2o8

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

off the railway from Eski-Shehir and Kutahia and
Afion-Kara-Hissar, but their strategy failed to enable
them to catch and destroy the Turkish main armies
which, being very mobile, slipped away. The Turks
made a coimter-attack and failed and began to retreat.

On the 14th of August in the torrid heat that eats up
the land of Anatolia, the Greeks moved all their troops
in a great concentrated advance on Angora. They
pushed the Turks in front of them until they reached
the Sakkaria river. This was the last obstacle between
them and the Nationalist capital. There across the
river they fought a tremendous battle where the issue
was constantly in doubt. Both sides fought with a
fierce courage. The percentage of casualties was very
high. Neither side had a moral superiority over the
other, for the Greeks despised the Turks, and the Turks
sneered at the Greeks as their old subjects. Both were
full of the venom of an hereditary hatred. As a whole
it appeared that, in contradiction to previous experience,
the Greek soldier surpassed the Turk. In the matter of
staffs and commanders the Turks were far the superior.

The Turks held their ground. The Greeks came
marching back over the Sakkaria river and formed up in
order. Unharassed to any extent by the enemy, they
retired back across Anatolia. By the end of September
they had taken up the position they had prepared in
July, in front of Eski-Shehir and Afion-Kara-Hissar and
the railway.

In these military operations the Greeks fell into an
error that has been repeated throughout history. The
whole and only object of military manceuvres is to pin

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

209

down and destroy the enemy^s fighting forces. All
other movements and destruction are subsidiary to this
end. Napoleon points out that the concentration on the
capture of an important town has ruined many a com-
mander. In advancing from their poor winter position
to the line covering the railway in front of them the
Greeks had full justification. Their subsequent plan
in August was to rush at Angora 200 miles to the east,
destroy it, frighten the Turks and then, having won a
moral position, to fall back on the old line and come
to terms with the enemy. But Angora was no more
than a village, and behind it were unlimited mountains
and desert spaces, and men fighting for their homes.

Having failed to obtain their objective, the Greeks
endeavoured to attain their end on their retreat by
systematic destruction. They destroyed the whole area.
They tore up every mile of the permanent way of the
railway. They cut down the trees, killed every Turk
who was foolish enough to be still there, and for 200
miles behind them left desolation and the villages flat
with the ground.

Their new line covered the railway. Its communica-
tions with the base were a good road that was well
protected and a railway that was open to sudden raids.
In due course the Turks reorganized their badly mauled
forces, and followed up the enemy. They took up a
position facing the Greeks and there for a year, except
for outpost encoimters, the hostile forces sat immobile.
Victory lay with the side that had the greater morale,
and the greater amount of grit and staying power.

The odds began to swing over to the Turks. The

p

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

209

down and destroy the enemy’s fighting forces. All
other movements and destruction are subsidiary to this
end. Napoleon points out that the concentration on the
capture of an important town has ruined many a com-
mander. In advancing from their poor winter position
to the line covering the railway in front of them the
Greeks had full justification. Their subsequent plan
in August was to rush at Angora 200 miles to the east,
destroy it, frighten the Turks and then, having won a
moral position, to fall back on the old line and come
to terms with the enemy. But Angora was no more
than a village, and behind it were xmlimited mountains
and desert spaces, and men fighting for their homes.

Having failed to obtain their objective, the Greeks
endeavoured to attain their end on their retreat by
systematic destruction. They destroyed the whole area.
They tore up every mile of the permanent way of the
railway. They cut down the trees, killed every Turk
who was foolish enough to be still there, and for 200
miles behind them left desolation and the villages flat
with the ground.

Their new line covered the railway. Its communica-
tions wdth the base were a good road that was well
protected and a railway that was open to sudden raids.
In due course the Turks reorganized their badly mauled
forces, and followed up the enemy. They took up a
position facing the Greeks and there for a year, except
for outpost encounters, the hostile forces sat immobile.
Victory lay with the side that had the greater morale,
and the greater amount of grit and staying power.

The odds began to swing over to the Turks. The

p

210

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Greeks found their backers had disappeared. The
British began openly to doubt their ability to stay in
Anatolia. The Italians had no liking for them. The
French had swung right over and were actively assisting
the Turks with aeroplanes and war material.

The French had observers in Angora. They now
sent M. Franklin-Bouillon to come to terms with the
Turks. He worked in secret and by stealth ; but there
are no secrets in Turkey. It is a vast whispering gallery
and the only hope of secrecy is in the fact that so many
are the lies that the truth may be sometimes buried
beneath them.

The Italian and the British Governments watched the
negotiations from a distance. Their position and the
urgent instructions to M. Franklin-Bouillon from Paris
were a caustic commentary on secret diplomacy. It
became obvious that the French were bargaining for
special trade facilities and had guaranteed to press for
the revision of the Treaty of Sevres. It had little force
with the French Government that they had promised
to make no separate peace with the enemy ; and on
the 20th of October, 1921, they signed, without refer-
ence to their -allies, a secret treaty of peace with the
Turks. Every chancellery in Europe was aware of its
existence, but it had to be left to an American journalist
to find a copy and publish it to the world before diplo-
matic action could be taken.

The Greek sticking power was limited. Their re-
sources had been strained to the utmost and were near
to snapping. At home they were torn by the factions
of Royalist and Venizelist who hated each other as much

THE GRECO-TURKISH WAR

21 1

as they hated the enemy. The new officers and officials
were more corrupt and less efficient than the old. They
are as a people unstable and swayed easily by the passions
of the moment. The morale of the troops was under-
mined by communiques from the new Commander-in-
Chief, Hadjienestis, to the effect that they were to
leave Anatolia shortly and by the proposal of the Allies,
made officially in March 1922, that they should evacuate
at once. The administrative services began to go to
pieces and the men were left short of food, pay, clothes
and ammunition. All the enthusiasm was steadily
sapped out of the nation and out of the troops.

Meanwhile the Turks found allies in the French and
the Caucasian Soviet Republics and in Moscow and every
country in Asia which was in revolt against Europe.
Their success at the Sakkaria battle had given them a
new hope. Roused, they were fighting doggedly for their
homes and their lives. They are a primitive people, and
as long as the kindly Powers gave them war material
they could last. They were buoyed up with the new
spirit of a new nation. Under the intense stimulus of
war old ideas were developing and new ones were being
evolved. Here and there incidents showed the stirring
of the new idea and of the new forces and new con-
ceptions. For the minute, fierce with hatred, they
concentrated on destroying the Greeks. So for a yeari
from September 1921 to September 1922, the enemies
faced each other while the Greeks grew pallid, tired
and nerveless, and the Turks grew robust and lusty
and strong.

CHAPTER XXIII

A Lull between the Storms

U ndisturbed by the war in Anatolia, the Allies
within the neutral 2one carried on in tranquillity.
Pera had settled down under the flatness of
peace. Now and again there would be a flare of excite-
ment. In September came the first of a number of
scares of plots. The Commander-in-Chief was to be
killed, and with him his staff. The authorities grew
busy and even excited. Orders were issued to arrest
the plotters, and copies were sent to all the High Com-
missioners and the Ottoman War Office and the Chief of
the Police.

Then from the Marquis Garroni in the Italian Em-
bassy right down to the loafers in the Skutari streets
every one laughed. The addresses of the plotters were
unknown but among those on the lists sent with the
orders for arrest were Fethi Bey and Ali of Yalma and
Keml of Adrianople and many such. In England they
would represent Mr. Jones, Alfred of York and Harold
of Manchester with “ addresses unknown.” The police
smiled discreetly. The gendarmerie laughed out loud.
Between them they arrested quite a number of men
with the right names but wrong personalities, and

212

A LULL BETWEEN THE STORMS 213

later these were graciously released. Somewhere a
number of agents and interpreters drew their well-
earned pay for the month of September.

In October I was detailed to proceed with the com-
mission that was to exchange the fifty odd Turks con-
fined in Malta with the British prisoners in the hands of
the Nationalists. We lay off Ineboli in the Black Sea
in a storm that blew out of the Crimea and roused the
sea until the destroyers dipped their sterns under each
mountainous wave. I went ashore to start negotiations
and found the Nationalists intensely hostile, offensive
and ungracious. All the pleasant good feeling which
existed towards us during the war was gone. I watched
the prisoners go ashore with mixed feelings. To see
Rahmi Bey and Reouf Bey free was to be glad that
justice was being done. To see Mazlum Bey, the late
commander of Afion-Kara-Hissar, and other foul crimi-
nals go scot-free was to feel to the full the humiliating
weakness of the British Empire ; for Mazlum was a
murderer in cold blood of British soldiers. As we sailed
away with only half the British prisoners which we had
expected to recover, I was glad to be finished with an
episode in which I had been so deeply involved and
which had befouled our good name for so long.

My gendarmerie area was now quiet except in the
south where the Greek troops held one shore of the
Gulf of Ismidt and we the other. Along our shore were
many Greek villages. Encouraged by the proximity of
the Hellenic troops, the villagers refused to pay taxes
and often brawled with the Ottoman officials.

The village of Pendik was especially bad. The priest

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TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

was a trouble-monger and the people sullen and obstinate.
I wished to see for myself, and so with Husein Husni
and Sami the Governor I took the train from Haidar
Pasha station.

Haidar Pasha begins the eastern section of the great
railway planned from Berlin to Bagdad. From here
along the Marmora shore to Eski-Shehir and then by
Konia to the Cilician Gates and down to Aleppo and
Mosul, the railway follows the route along which for
centuries trade has travelled and along which many of
the great conquerors have marched to the dominion
of the world. Cyrus of Persia, Alexander of Macedon,
the Seljuk Turks and the Crusaders used it. The
Romans and Napoleon realized its value.

The Germans had seen that whoever holds this route
may threaten and dominate the whole Near East. They
had dreamt a great dream of the railway from Haidar
Pasha to the Taurus, tapping the wealth of Syria and
threatening Egypt, and then across to Bagdad and
Basra, and perhaps some day to India. The surplus
population of Germany was to have been planted as
colonists in the potentially rich valleys of Anatolia, and
German efficiency and hard work were to have revived
a dead world. It was the dream of a great Eastern
Empire, It was born at Haidar Pasha and there it died.
Over the station was a great clock. Above it a twisted
girder and a broken chimney stood gaunt up against
the sky. The clock had stopped at 12.31, It was the
time of the great explosion of 1917. The yards and
the trains had been packed with ammunition and guns
to be sent to the Turkish forces facing Generals Allenby

A LULL BETWEEN THE STORMS 215

and Maude. A train, full of German experts, was
about to move off when a terrific explosion occurred.
Tons of ammunition, supplies, steel girders, bits of train
and lines were thrown into the air. At the other end
in Mesopotamia and Syria the Turks went short of
food and ammunition, while General Allenby advanced.
The clock was the symbol of a great idea caught by
the throat and its neck broken.

We travelled through the rich villages that throng
the Marmora shore. They are mainly Christian. At
last we came to Pendik. There had been a further
fight with the tax-collectors that morning, and we called
the headman and elders, together with the Moslem hodja
and the Greek priest, to meet us on the pier by the
coffee-shop.

We sat with our backs to the sea and they faced us
in a half-circle. The Governor had his say, and then
I appealed to them, both Moslem and Christian, to
forget the wrongs they had done each other, to put
politics aside and live as Ottomans in peace and harmony.

They sat in silence looldng on the floor, except the
Greek priest whose eyes kept staring intently past me.
Instinctively I looked round. Behind us the Marmora
ran into the narrow gulf of Ismidt. The opposite
shore, two miles away, stood out clear across the calm
blue water. Towering up into the windless sky were
five straight columns of smoke. As an allied commis-
sion saw them at their foul work, the Greek troops were
raping, pillaging and burning in the Moslem villages
and many Ottoman Greeks were helping them. The
rest of my carefully prepared speech died in my throat.

2i6 turkey in travail

In the gendarme post outside the village lay an old
Greek watchman. He had refused bread to ZafEri
and the brigands had beaten him with the sharp edges
of knives, as they had beaten the woman of the village
of Jews. As he lay in his blood-soaked clothes and
died slowly, he told us all he knew and that the band
was out in the open country.

Messages were sent to put in motion every gendarme
to intercept the brigands. We took horses from Pendik
and set out northwards. The street was bright and
warm in the pleasant winter’s sun. At the last comer
sat a beggar. His legs were stumps horribly mauled
and exposed to win pity. He had one withered arm
drawn across his breast. The palm of his hand was
turned up for alms and the fingers were all twisted
together. His head was shaved close. He had but
one eye. The odier was a glaring white socket. He
sat in the bright sun while the wind brought up the
taste of good salt from the sea. He mewed at me, for
his tongue had been tom out. He looked as if he had
been half pinched in some colossal and horrible vice.
He had once been comely and strong, but the Turks
had massacred his village and he had been left mutilated
and for dead. He had revived and in his twisted awful
deformity, in the open sunny street, he sat a fitting
relic of Ottoman mle.

We came to the Moslem village of Samandra, and
decided to rest the night. When the Governor sat to
hear complaints, an old Armenian hobbled up to accuse
the villagers of persecuting him. Our inquiries showed
that he was the rich man of the village, but he would

A LULL BETWEEN THE STORMS 217

not pay the watchman’s tax which came to a few coppers
each week and was paid without question by all the
other householders. Thirty years before he had come
as a penniless labourer to the village. Now he owned
half of it and held mortgages on the rest. He took
us to his house which he had built in an underground
Genoese bazaar. This he had excavated and made
into an oil-press. He was a bent old man, and he
walked with two sticks. His shoes were of heavy wood
and he wore the pleated trousers of the Armenians
which have a seat that hangs down to the heels. As
he peered up at us out of his grimy room with his wicked
old face and crafty eyes, he looked like some great toad.
I expressed my opinion that he ought to pay. Where-
upon he pushed some money into my hand and bade
me pay die headman. This man had refused to pay
for twenty years. He had lived alone, the only Christian
among Turks. They had murdered his relatives in
other villages. He had been beaten and imprisoned
and yet he refused to pay, and finally he paid because
a stranger said he ought to pay. His mental process
was impossible to follow, and his obstinacy was charac-
teristic of his race.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Christian Minorities

T he most difficult problem which confronted
the Gendarmerie Supervising Officers was
caused by the relations between the Christians
and Moslems in Turkey. The more I saw of them,
the more complicated they appeared, and the more
difficult it became to arrive at just decisions.

The question of the Christian Minorities had its
roots in far-distant history. Its influence had spread
beyond Turkey and become part of the variegated tex-
ture of international diplomacy. The waves of Turkish
hordes of invaders, that resulted in the conquest of
Anatolia and the supremacy of the Osmanlis, had swept
over old civilizations that were stale and long since
diseased. They did not destroy them nor yet absorb
them, but often they borrowed their worst characteristics.
Thus, from the Byzantines, the Osmanlis took the
practices of farming taxes and of ill-treating ambassadors.

The Turks made no attempts to absorb the Christian
communities that they conquered. As long as they
paid taxes and were obedient the Christians were allowed
full liberty to rule themselves. Thus it happened that,
while the Government of the Ottoman Empire was

218

THE CHRISTIAN MINORITIES

219

Turkish, it contained representatives of the Christian
communities and these, which produced all the wealth,
were semi-self-governing.

For a while the Greeks obtained such influence that
at one time they virtually controlled the administration
of the Ottoman Empire, This period of what is known
as that of the Phanariot Rule ” came to an end with
the revolt of Greece proper in 1821. From this date
onwards each success of the Greeks of Greece spelt
disaster for the Greeks of Turkey. It is instructive to
remember that the original revolt of the Hellenes was
made possible by the rapacity and extortion of their
Phanariot Greek rulers.

As long as the Empire was all-powerful the Turks
were content ; but times changed. From the defeat
in front of Vienna and the death of Suleiman the Mag-
nificent the Turkish power declined rapidly, until by
the eighteenth century each and every observer pro
phesied its immediate dissolution.

In Europe there came an age of expansion and every
great nation looked on Turkey with greedy eyes. One
by one they pressed in on her, eager for their share of
the spoils at her imminent dissolution. The diplomats
found a congenial sphere and played one against the
other till the tottering Ottoman Empire was buttressed
up on every side by the rivals. Jealous of each other
they maintained the moribund state, but all were afraid
to rush in and complete the destruction. Russia made
one bold attempt in the early nineteenth century, and
it resulted in her defeat in the Crimean War. Pieces
of territory were torn away, when occasion served.

220

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

The French seized Algeria. The British took Egypt.
The Austro-Hungarians took Herzegovina and Bosnia.
But the main body of the Empire, though diseased and
paralysed, remained intact.

Direct assault being impossible, the Powers sought
other methods. They proclaimed themselves the cham-
pions of the down-trodden Christian communities .
Russia obtained the right to protect the Orthodox,
and France to protect the Roman Catholic subjects
of the Porte. Using these rights they fomented rebel-
lion within ; and, adding to them the stringent control
of the Capitulations, they reduced the Ottoman Empire
to a state of servitude. Turkey had ceased to be a
sovereign power, when the sudden and meteoric arrival
of Germany threw all the other calculations into con-
fusion.

Nationalism, the child of the French Revolution, had
by the twentieth century become the outstanding cha-
racteristic of Europe. Its influence came to Turkey.
The Christian communities became political organiza-
tions, and nationalities engaged in a fierce struggle for
existence. The Patriarchs became as it were their
Consul-Generals. That struggle was intensified by the
interference of the foreign Powers.

But the Turks were impregnated by the same idea.
It was the foundation of the Committee of Union and
Progress. It was the war-cry of the revolution of 1908.
The Turks were determined to ‘‘ turkify ” Turkey;
Instigated by the foreign Powers, the Christians refused
to become Turks, and so the breach that had been
between Moslem and Christian was now widened.

THE CHRISTIAN MINORITIES

221

These and a complication of other facts were the
causes of the mutual slaughter of the massacres. Foreign
interference was the venom that drove the Christians
to obstinate resistance and the Turks to kill. In 1878
the Treaty of Berlin decided to protect the Armenians,
and was the direct cause of their massacre in 1896. To
the Turks their Christian subjects now threatened their
state and their religion and had become traitors. They
developed the hatred that, in very similar circumstances,
drove the English of the Middle Ages to persecute the
Jews. They feared the secret political organizations
with their foreign links. The Christians threatened their
existence at every point. The Turk for one reason and
another had become sterile. Their women, though
broad-hipped, produced few children and those born
died young. On the other hand the Christians multi-
plied like flies in a valley of offal.

Economically the Turks were being crushed out.
The Christians were the workers and the hoarders,
while the Turks were soldiers and spenders. In England
we deal with economic problems of wealth distribution
by super-tax and such like legal methods. The Turks
endeavoured to deal with theirs by murdering the col-
lectors of wealth and so taking back by force what had
been won from them by work and brains. As an expert
once said : ‘‘ A good Government must always be on
the side of the craftiest and cunningest, even the worst
section of the population. If the Turk is given ‘ good
government ’ he must come to an end ; for if he cannot
murder the Greek and the Armenian, they will out-
breed him and buy him up.’’

232

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Military reasons, especially during the Great War,
added their quota. The Greek massacres of 1916 were
due to the occupation of Mytilene and the islands off the
mainland by the Allies. The Armenians lay between
the Turks and their relatives of Central Asia. They
were a bar to the realization of the Pan-Turanian policy,
and so with ruthless cruelty they were wiped away.

The Armistice found the Turks beaten to their knees.
Scattered over Anatolia lay the torn remnants of the
Christian Minorities. Their ancient instigators to resis-
tance were now the world victors. In the struggle
for nationalism the Turks appeared to have gone under.
All the separate sects shouted that they were free and
demanded recognition. The Peace Conference lent a
ready ear to their demands. They were treated as
allies and fully utilized. They believed that the Turks
were at an end. They insulted them gratuitously. An
Armenian-Greek section was formed in the British
Embassy to right all their ancient wrongs. The Greeks
of Greece were sent into Anatolia as the Allied police.
The Ottoman Greeks claimed their revenge at the
British Embassy, and took it in massacring with the
Hellenic troops.

They put forward fantastic claims. The bishop
and people of Trebizond demanded a Pontus State.
The Armenians plotted out their new country to run
from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and to cover
some 400,000 square miles. They demanded that the
Allies should eject all Moslems from this area. They
issued delightful booklets over the signatures of M.
Aharonian and Boghos Nubar giving tables of their

THE CHRISTIAN MINORITIES

223

virtues and ending with the delightful qualification
for ruling by the Armenian race ‘‘ which in addition is
remarkably prolific.”

The Allies contracted with demobilization and with-
drew, leaving their wretched proteges to the mercy
of their rulers. In a fury, that can be well understood,
the Turks came back with murder in their hearts. To
them all the Christians were now traitors. The worst
brutalities of the Greek troops had been instigated
and assisted by the Ottoman Christians. The Turks
set to work to wipe them out finally, much as a surgeon
cuts away some growth which the body cannot absorb
and which threatens life.

In all these changes and these fierce struggles of
nationalities the Moslem and the Christian showed
themselves equally villainous in their bestialities. Which-
ever side got on top massacred the other. In the Revolt
for Independence the Greeks murdered the Turks in
the Morea. In 1917 the Turks massacred the Greeks.
In 1919 the Greeks retaliated round Smyrna, and again
in 1920 and 1921. In 1922 the Turks took their revenge
and wiped out the Ottoman Greeks. In 1915 the Turks
had massacred the Armenians. In 1916 the Armenian
Christian Army of Revenge came down with the Russians
and killed all the Moslems of Van, while our noble allies,
the Russians wiped out every Turk round Rowanduz.
This list could be continued in red entry on red entry.
The result of outside interference has been to intensify
the brutalities. It can only be said that Greek and
Turk and Armenian understand each other far better
than we understand any of them, and all would

224

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

have been better off, if Europe had left them alone.

The misery of the peasantry, the ruin of the country-
side and the fact that the hills were full of brigands were
the direct results of the terrible history of this mutual
massacre of neighbours.

We in the gendarmerie areas were late comers and we
saw only the end of the struggle. The Treaty of Sevres,
which we were enforcing, made a last effort to save the
Christians. Beyond us now across all Anatolia the
limited massacres were replaced by deliberate and
careful extermination.

The supervising officers were instructed to see that
the peasantry, and especially the Christians, were not
ill-treated by the Ottoman officials. It was not an
easy task, for though often justice seemed with the
Christians, their personal and national characteristics
made it hard to stand by them and hold out continually
the hand of friendship. Christianity did not come
into the question for ‘‘ our common Christianity was
not a living reality, but a historical curiosity.^’ The
Christians often appealed to it, but they found but
little response among the British.

Whereas the Turks, despite their record of vice and
brutality, are pre-eminently lovable and have great
charm, the Ottoman Greeks are crude, noisy and un-
lovable. They are hard-working and vociferous. Though
rarely physically brave, they have much mental and
verbal truculence.

The Armenians are a black-haired, black-eyed people
with runaway foreheads and hooked noses like the
Hittites. About them there is nothing kindly. They

THE CHRISTIAN MINORITIES

22S

are crafty, grasping, hard-working and dishonest. They
are a highly nervous, over capable and over intelligent
race. They are afflicted with an obstinacy that would
enrage the mildest tyrant. They cannot and will not
submit to any rule.

The Christians imitate and so burlesque European
manners and ways. They irritate in details — in the way
they eat and walk and talk. Even when giving me
hospitality they drove me to distraction. They have
the craft, the dishonesty, the cheap trickery and the
oily, cringing subservience mixed with truculence that
are the result of centuries of oppression. Ill-treated
children develop such characteristics. Often it required
all my sense of discipline to keep down my irritation
and see justice done to a Christian by a courteous and
charming and quite unjust Turkish official.

As the old toad-like Armenian peered up at me out
of his grimy room in Samandra village, I could not help
admiring the tenacity of his race nor help realizing the
tragic complications of these problems, to which I was
but an observer from the outside.

0

CHAPTER XXV

The End of Brigandage— in the Ismidt Area

W E had decided to stay that night at Samandra.

Sami the Governor had left for Skutari.
Hardly had it grown dark, before the head-
man of the neighbouring Greek village of Pasha Keuy,
with infinite precautions and stealth, came to me. Our
luck was in. The brigands had grown drunk in Pasha
Keuy. The headman had been wantonly beaten by
Zaffiri, and now was eager for revenge. He told us of
the secret oven in his village from where the Greek
brigands got their bread. He told us of a lair to which
Zaffiri had gone and which was an old cowpen on a
hill-top deep in the great forest.

Husein Husni was still out on the hills. I called Zia
the Lieutenant, a small dapper man as hard and wiry
as a hill goat. He was eager for a chance, for hitherto
it had been his work to sit in Head-quarters and extract
information from prisoners. It had half-frozen my
blood more than once to find him sitting cold and impas-
sive, without any of the lust of cruelty in him, jotting
down methodically the words that escaped some twisting
tortured prisoner ; such are ways of Turkishjustice. We
set out with Hassan, the Bash-Chaoush, a huge swarthy

226

BRIGANDAGE IN THE ISMIDT AREA 227

Serjeant with a fierce swagger, and with two dozen
mounted men.

As we came to the forest a great storm came burst-
ing down off the Black Sea. It was pitch dark.
Through the trees the wind drove the rain into our
eyes, till they tingled as if beaten with fine spikes. Under-
foot the narrow paths were of slippery clay and full
of pools of water. The forest was alive. The storm
had loosed a thousand devils, who whistled through
the tree-tops and screamed and filled the forest with a
great roar. The strength of nature came hurtling by
in tremendous and terrifying force. Now and again
with a boom and a crash a tall tree came down.

In the dismal rain-swept dawn under low scurrying
clouds we reached the hill. We dismounted and pre-
pared to clamber up it in a circle. The cowshed was
well placed. The hill was covered with low scrub till
near the top and then was bare with the cowshed making
a good look-out over all. The gendarmes had come
out of the scrub and were round the shed in a circle.
There was no sign of life. In the dreary dawn I told
the headman in muttered whispers what I would do
to him if he had lied.

There was a yard round the shed and a low wall
with a door. I bade Hassan the Bash-Chaoush kick in the
door. I wished to give him another chance to retrieve
his character for he had done good work in the past
and now stood to be disgraced. Sometimes the beast
got the upper hand with him, and only last week he
had gone philandering and beaten all the male relations
of the lady, when they objected.

228

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

As he burst open the door a man with a rifle stood
up. He was the sentry and Demitri the half-brother
of Zafflri. To avoid the wind he had, at the moment
that the gendarmes came out of the scrub, bent down
to roll and light a cigarette and so had failed to see
us or give the alarm. Behind him in the shed were
Pavli and Zaffiri and the rest of the band. They sat
submissively with their hands between their knees and
made no resistance. Without enthusiasm we led them
away. At last the area was free.

Zafiiri was a quiet-looking fellow, but before we
handed him over to the central prison he confessed to
eighty-seven murders. Behind the cowshed the gen-
darmes had found two skeletons. We put them down
in ZafEri’s cell and he confessed to their murder.

And why did you kill them ? ” I asked.

‘‘ Effendi,” he replied, ‘‘ Demitri had newly joined
the band and he did not know how to kill. We saw
these two Albanians come over the hill ; so we caught them
and held them. Demitri is a poor hand at such things,
and it was a long time before he lulled them properly.’’

Our captures were kept in the great central prison
in Stambul. I visited them and found them all shut
into one large underground room, such as I had seen
in the days of my own captivity. Among them were
a number of men who were innocent witnesses of the
crimes committed. Some of these had been put in
there two years before by the British military authori-
ties. They had been kept confined until the criminals
were caught, and now they were all herded together,
witnesses and criminals alike.

BRIGANDAGE IN THE ISMIDT AREA zzg

After I left, there was a quarrel over a game of cards.
The prisoners dug nails out of the walls, sharpened
them and fought. Zaffiri, being clever, cut the electric
light and crouched in a comer. When the warders
came to separate them, Zaffiri alone was unhurt. Karao-
glan was badly wounded and died. Twenty more were
full of holes.

As it was now free of brigands we set to work to
bring prosperity to the area. I learnt the love of the
administrator which is as all-absorbing as the love of
women, the making of money or the intensity of the
religious fanatic. It is a thing out of the knowledge
of the Labour Party or the stay-at-homes, who label it
as the spirit of Imperialism and pile abuse on it. It
is beyond the calculations of the dry-as-dust ; and it
would take such a dreary brain as that of John Stuart
Mill’s to call the Empire, that it has built, a system
of out-relief for the younger sons of the aristocracy.”

It absorbed life and every minute and all the energy
of it. We put the villages straight. We built the roads.
We chased out fear as a dominant factor and attracted
back some sense of confidence. We doctored the people
and protected them and connected telephones to their
villages. The Law Courts returned to Skutari. The
taxes began to show that there was an increase in pros-
perity. Life began to become normal. The people
became my people, and this land my land.

All this was far harder work than brigand-catching,
for the Turks especially have to be helped by force
and only long afterwards are they grateful. Moreover
while it was the excitement of the chase the gendarmes

230

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

were excellent, but in the normal routine of every day
they grew slack. The Turkish officers were of little
use. ‘They neglected their men. They were the worst
man-masters ” possible. The senior officers expected
to be supplied free with eggs and chickens and ducks
and to have a share in any wood contracts, The men,
though short of clothes and pay and food, looked up
to their officers. Also they looked after their officers.
They carried on at their duties and in cases of emergency
were capable of real effort. Treated with any care,
they would be excellent. They would equally quickly
be spoilt by over-care.

§

The area was running well. The Turkish officials,
from Sami the Governor downwards, were working with
us. The war away beyond us in Anatolia was at a
standstill and affected us but little. In June 1922 I
asked for leave and it was granted.

BRIGAND BAND OF ZAFFIRI, KARAOGI-AN AND PAVH HAND-CUFFEJ

CHAPTER XXVI

The Balkans, Central Europe and England
in 1922

I HAD said au-revoir to all my villages and my gen-
darmes and had come back to pack when Prince
Sami, the stepson of Damad Ferid Pasha, the
brother-in-law of the Sultan and ex-Grand Vizier, called
me on the telephone and asked me to see him urgently
at the Pera Palace Hotel.

As soon as I arrived I was ushered into a special
saloon, I found Prince Sami with a revolver in his
hip-pocket and another laid ready on a table. The
glass doors of the salon were covered with screens. The
red curtains had been drawn across the long French
windows. He looked behind each curtain and under
each piece of furniture. He spoke in a whisper. It
was a comedy of the complete conspirator, and I found
it hard to restrain my laughter. But the message that
he wished to give me was far from comic.

It was from the Sultan. Prince Sami had long held
a special position with Plis Majesty and he had been
trusted with this. The message was simple. The
Sultan said, “ Tell Mr. Lloyd George and those in
power in England that the end is near. They do not

231

232

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

understand. I have told the British Embassy, and they
do not believe. The men of Mustapha Kemal are
revolutionaries. They will turn Turkey upside-down.
They will not respect me nor my office. They will
destroy religion. They are your enemies. They are
rebels and my enemies, I believe that you are the only
salvation of Turkey and I am your friend. From Angora
you will get nothing. I will give you what you want.
If you wish to save the Sultanate and the Khalifate,
you must come quickly to my help. Refuse to recognize
Angora, and make peace with me. Give me a good
peace, and all that you are prepared to give to Angora.
Guarantee that the Greeks shall leave Anatolia, and
hand it over to me bit by bit as they go. Give me a
loan of 5^4,000,000, against which you shall have sound
mortgages. With these I will put a good government
in power. I will go personally to Brusa and call my
people to me. Many of them still fight to release the
Khalif from Allied bondage, and they will come. I
will make friends with the French and be part of the
Entente. Together we will revive Turkey and make
her prosperous, but there must be no mandates. I will
help traders. I will keep the Straits open. I will stand
by you as the Kdialif, for you have been the defenders
of the faithful. I will protect the Christians, who will
be my loyal subjects. The men of Angora are full of
blood and red ideas from Moscow, and will do none
of these things.”

It was the last appeal of the House of Osman, which
had once ruled half the world. It was the funeral dirge
of the only policy that could have helped the Allies.

THE BALKANS AND ENGLAND 233

It was too late. Two years before, even one year before,
it might have succeeded. It had been often proposed
to and then ignored by Whitehall. Prince Sami, Damad
Ferid Pasha, a few disgruntled politicians and a handful
of palace officials were now all that was left of the
millions of subjects of the Sultan. Prince Sami with his
revolvers, his whispering, his excited exclamations on spies
as the shadow of a waiter passed one of the glass doors,
only accentuated the truth and made a comedy of atragedy.

§

Politeness, like many a virtue, is often uncompanionable
and tiring. As was the custom in Txirkey, Sami the
Governor and all the officers, with Hadji to represent
the cavalry and Hassan the infantry, came to see me
off. They had piled my carriage full of baskets of
sweets, macaroons and Turkish delight. I ate those
sweets till I was ill. I fed the population at each station
till they had toothache. The guard, the engine drivers,
the chefs-de-gare went about their work with great
lumps in their cheeks. Ticket collectors, passport men
and contraband hunters became sticky and pleasant ;
and left me in peace. Still I had made but little effect
on the mass, and in desperation I dumped it on a German
frau and her bespectacled family and left them method-
ically chewing.

Hardly were we out of Constantinople before we were
amongst Greek troops. Here they were crowding in,
pressing in, close to the city of their aspirations. Every
Greek looked at the Golden City and hoped to possess
it. It was at hand, and they toiled in lie arid wastes

234

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

of Thrace. We travelled through this great, bare, wind-
swept, stony plain, which is pinched by the cold of
winter and burnt by the summer^s pitiless sun. The
villages were of mean mud huts with old thatched roofs.
For miles there was not a tree, and the only life that
showed were a few larks in the dried grass and sometimes
a flock of lean sheep. It seemed a poor place to die
for except as the high road to the Golden City beyond.

All the Balkans were full of soldiers and bellicose
talk. Everywhere there were soldiers, wearing British
boots and American uniforms. In Sofia the streets were
full of troops, said to be there to deal with the unruly
remnants of Wrangel’s army ; but it was a town of
ruin and desolation, streets in holes, houses fallen down
and everywhere despair.

In Servia they were full of energy. They talked of
the revenge that they still hoped to take from Hungary
and the wars that they must fight for Salonika and for
a port on the Adriatic. On their maps Fiume had a
red circle round it to denote danger.” In Belgrade
there were soldiers again. Everywhere it seemed that,
before they were well free of the World War, these
people were preparing to begin a dozen dog-scraps. An
American looked out of the window as we raced up
the broad plain by the Danube into Hungary.

We did well,” he said, to cut free of all this.
You’d better follow suit quickly in England. There is
one piece of hope. From South Russia to the Atlantic
this year’s corn crop is good.”

We came to Buda-Pest. I was glad to have left the
Balkans far behind us. There was no laughter in them,

THE BALKANS AND ENGLAND 235

nor the joy of living nor the knowledge of the clean
good things of life. The people were as dry and rugged
as their land. Over them all still lay the remnants of
the blight of the Turks. I realized it in a thousand
ways. These countries reminded me of trees submerged
under a long winter’s flood. When the flood has gone, and
before spring comes to call out new shoots, the trees are
covered with mud and refuse that become dry and unsightly .

Buda-Pest lay quiet in the sunlight. Its traffic of
carts ran on rubber- tired wheels upon asphalt roads.
The sweat and tired eyes, the acid rough food and squalor
of life was behind me. Sir Thomas Hohler, the Minister,
gave me refuge in his Legation and there I found sud-
denly a cool miles-deep bed in which to sleep, soft
food, wines of the gods, pictures, carpets, porcelain
and books in shaded rooms. Life was good.

In Buda-Pest was the stillness and beauty of great
stone cathedrals and the splendour of wide streets and
stately houses. Far behind me was the carrion and
garbage, the stale smell of evil and misery, that is thick in
Constantinople. The atmosphere of the Balkans, in which
coarse primitive animal conditions with murder and war
and terribleness are the normal aspect of life, was gone.

Here security and hope looking forward, and peace
were ingrained in the habits of the people. They had
been misused by Bela Kun and his foul Bolsheviks.
They had struck back in wild reaction and suffered the
horrors of revolution and civil war. But these things
were terrors that had been forced on them. They
were a quiet people wanting a monarchy. They were
glad to be held steady for the minute by one strong

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

236

man, Admiral Horthy, the Regent. They understood,
they wanted, they were used to peace and prosperity.
Left alone, they would quickly have put their affairs in
order, but on their frontiers sat the snarling states of
the Balkans, combined into the Little Entente, deter-
mined that the Hungarians should not succeed.

The Legation looked down over the Danube as it
twisted under great bridges, and out across Pest into
unlimited miles of corn-fields that faded into the distance
like a sea. They were working in Buda-Pest and there
was hope. To me looking down over that wonderful
expanse of city and corn land — ^it seemed incredible that
those lazy, inefficient useless Turks, that I knew, should
have ruled as far as this. They had swept forward in
blood and terribleness. They had been driven back in
blood and terribleness and left behind them only a few
smoking ruins. This was the frontier to which the
East had swept up over the West. Then the West had
swept back half across Asia, and at the minute the two
great forces faced each other.

I caught the train to Vienna and so came to the ‘‘ City
of Gilded Despair.’’ My life among the Turks had
made me critical of Europe. I wondered now what
Europe had to offer. In Vienna I found a vivid indict-
ment of our civilization. There was all that a man
could want and all that, when he talked of progress, he
praised. There was wonderful opera and exquisite music.
There were cabarets — ^where they kept iron curtains on the
windows to hide the luxuries from the hungry crowd
— ^in which they served wild strawberries in cham-
pagne and beautiful women danced exotic dances*

THE BALKANS AND ENGLAND 237

There were pictures by Rubens in the Academy and
furs and gold watches in the shops. A man might
telephone to Buda Pest, or telegraph to London or fly
to Warsaw, or drive down great noble streets in a luxu-
rious limousine. And the people were starving. Six
hundred years before our civilization had taken a turning
into a blind alley. Now its delicately balanced mechanism
had broken down. The people were starving. The
night women were fierce. The clerks and the shop
assistants white-faced crept to the cafes in the limch
hour and lolled over a cup of coffee. They were all
bones and flabby flesh, slack and listless with under-
feeding. The workmen were wild beasts, for they were
not sure of their next meal. Everywhere hunger showed
out like a skull beneath a fine hat or the bones of a
skeleton dressed in a silken gown. Our civilization had
produced the complicated mechanisms of the taxi and
of democratic rule and had failed to keep away hunger
and despair. On the frontier, determined that Austria,
now all head and no body, should not struggle out of
the slough of despair, sat Italy snarling. I wondered
no more that the East refused the civilization of Europe.

In an express train we raced through Germany and
so into Belgium. We crossed a still summer’s sea and
ran into Dover Harbour on a late June day. When I
came to London they were carrying Field-Marshal Sir
Henry Wilson down to St. Paul’s. England had already
forgotten the Great War. It did not realize from what
this great soldier, and those with him, had saved it.
In the country the lazy cattle chewed the cud in quiet,
neat fields. The people went peacefully to work and

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

238

home to clean cottages. Everywhere there was money.
There were rows of cars in the London streets. The
cinemas and theatres were full. The people did not
realize the boons of stability and those of security and
peace. One hour in the fear of defencelessness in
Turkey ; one day in the uncertainty of Bulgaria or the
misery of Vienna, and they would have understood. For
defeat in the Great War would have meant that England
would have been a little starving island in the North
Sea, if obstinate, blockaded by the enemy’s fleet, and
full of murder, bloodshed and revolution. It is good
to forget evil, but foolish to forget the evil that can come.

It was my first summer in England for many years.
With a pang of thanksgiving I was glad that I had
escaped to see it. The grumblers left me unmoved.
They could not appreciate England, nor its clean grass
lawns and welcome pleasant sun. In Turkey and all
the East the people are stale with tired bodies, for they
live in lands that are stale and tired. They wake to
the dry sun in the morning no fresher than they went
to sleep. They do not know the kick and pulse of
life. Despite the songs of their poets they have no
scents like those of English roses. I would rather hear
one blackbird singing in a cool English garden than all
the nightingales of Alemdar and Ispahan under the
white moon.

§

Partly through friends and partly personally I delivered
the Sultan’s message. It had no more effect than a
small wave on a concrete bastion. The great men

THE BALKANS AND ENGLAND 239

listened politely, were interested and returned to their
folly as before. The Foreign Office was still short-
circuited and Lord Curzon appeared to acquiesce without
agreeing. The Turkish Nationalists sent Ali Fethi Bey
to London to come to some terms, but he was turned
away. Damad Ferid Pasha arrived, but met with no
encouragement.

Then suddenly events began to move. The Greeks,
feeling the strain and also recognizing that the Allies
were in a blind-alley, prepared to march on Constanti-
nople. On the 28th of July they were warned back by
Sir Charles Harington, the Allied Commander-in-Chief
in Turkey, and went no further. In August Mr. Lloyd
George made a speech at Manchester, extolling the
virtues of the Greeks and calling for a conference to
bring the deadlock to an end. In this speech he made
some reference to the Sultan as the real Government
of Turkey. That fact had at last and too late penetrated
to his brain. The Turks, wishing to be in a strong
position for such a conference, played for delay, and
then attacked the Greeks. Their plans were well laid.
They feinted at Eski Shekir, and burst through with
weight of numbers at Afion-Kara-Hissar. To the sur-
prise of every one, including the Turks, the Greek troops
went on strike and marched away. Harassed by the
Turks on every side and neglected by their own officers,
in an incredibly short space of time they were pushed
out of Anatolia. The Turks marched into Smyrna, and
Brusa, and up towards Chanak, and on to the frontier
of the Ismidt Peninsula. The whole position was
changed, as I hurried back to Constantinople,

CHAPTER XXVII

The Greek Defeat, the Chanak Crisis, and
the Mudania Conference, 1922

A S a snail that has suddenly had its shell laiocked
away, the Allies in the Neutral Zone found
themselves naked and unprotected, facing the
victorious Turks. Smyrna had been taken on the loth
of September and burnt to the ground, and its rich
Christian merchants ruined and driven out.

A glance at the map showed at once what had happened
and where lay the zones of danger. The Greek troops
had gone on strike. Here and there a few had turned
and done heavy damage to the Turks. By phenomenal
marching they had extracted themselves from contact
with the enemy, and reached their bases on the shore.
They had taken ship to Thrace and so put the sea
between them and the Turks. Now they were reform-
ing in Thrace on the Maritza river. Between the Allies
and the Turks the protecting screen was gone. The
position had reversed, for the Allies had become the
buffer between the enemies.

The Greeks had moved with an amazing rapidity.
The Turkish cavalry had done its best, but the main
force had failed to keep contact. They found the enemy

240

THE GREEK DEFEAT

241

gone. Between them was the broad sea. One bridge
across remained and that was formed by the area from
the Bosphorus through Constantinople to the Dardanelles.
This was the neutral zone, and the bridge was held by
the Allies.

Of this bridge the key-point was Chanak. It was
the door to Adrianople, and its possession outflanked
and threatened the communications both by land and
sea of the small Allied force that held Constantinople.
The Turks, somewhat taken aback at their own success
and at the extraordinary disappearance of the Greeks,
began to form up and concentrate towards the Allied
neutral zone. General Harington, seeing the danger,
organized a mobile force of all the Allies and hoped
with this and a show of Allied flags on the neutral
frontier to keep back the Turks.

With instinctive good strategy the Turks came hurrying
along, looking for their enemy before he could reform
and reorganize. They hoped to catch him still moving
and chase him down to Athens.

Reports showed that the second Turkish Army of
40,000 men was moving on to Chanak. The French
and Italians began to grow nervous. On the 22nd of
September they removed their flags from the frontier
and retired their forces. That culminating act of stupid-
ity was due to the politicians in Paris and Rome. The
commanders on the spot, both as honourable men and
soldiers, had no part in it. France and Italy paid in
humiliation a heavy price for their folly.

Alone the British stood facing the storm. Encouraged
by the rift in the Entente, and by French observers

R

242

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

with their army, the Turks desired to discover if the
British Empire would stand its ground and, if necessary,
fight. On the morning of the 23rd of September they
sent 1,100 cavalry across the neutral frontier.

The British scouts could see away in the distance the
dust of columns of infantry marching. Chanak was
covered by good trenches and barbed wire, except for
a gap on one flank. It was held by three thousand well-
equipped infantry with artillery. A handful of cavalry
and mounted infantry acted as feelers. There were
aeroplanes in good numbers able to maintain complete
air superiority. Behind in the Dardanelles lay a great
armada of cruisers and destroyers, led by four huge
battleships. Conscious of its strength, this fleet was
eager to fight. ‘i

It was a crucial moment. The stakes were large.
To allow the Turks to cross over was to bring war into
the Balkans. It was placing a lighted faggot among
barrels of gunpowder. Bolshevik Russia might invade
Bessarabia. The quarrel of Italy and Servia in Albania
might come to a head. Every country was sore and at
loggerheads with its neighbours. There were a thou-
sand complications and a thousand people who strove
for war. There was imminent danger that the flame
might spread across Europe and light another great war
of destruction. On the other hand, to forbid the Turks
to cross might bring the British Empire into direct hostile
conflict with the Turks, and produce a similar result.

Despite all the folly of his previous policies, in a
great decision that marked him as a great man, Mr.
Lloyd George decided to hold back the Turks even at

THE GREEK DEFEAT

H3

the cost of war. He realized the stakes at issue. He
also realized the sound method of obtaining success.
He showed his teeth. He gave orders to fight. He
called to the Empire to stand up, to protect its honour
and its interests. With that magnificent decision Mr.
Lloyd George threw away office and his own career.

From Malta and Gibraltar and Egypt troops were
hurried. In Australia and England crowds of men
demanded to be enlisted. A guards brigade, squadrons
of aeroplanes, artillery and marines were shipped post-
haste. The Navy gave its cordial assent and enthusiastic
assistance. Admiral Beatty was prepared to blow every-
body and everything offensive sky-high and make the
transit of the Bosphorus and the Straits, even for a
rowing-boat, impossible. In Chanak the local com-
manders were full of belief in success and the troops
had a placid contempt for the Turks, who had never
yet turned British troops out of trenches.

The Turks were hesitating. They were poor troops,
short of ammunition and necessities. Their bases were
far away and the lines of communication inefficient.
They were bluffing. Mr. Lloyd George played bluff
against bluff, and kept war only as a last weapon to
save the Empire from dishonour. His bluff was called,
not by the enemy, but by the Allies and by Englishmen.
The French assured the Turks that the British would
give way. The English papers shouted for peace at all
costs, and their correspondents, ignorant of the facts,
howled with despair. The newspaper-owners carried
their private quarrels shamelessly into international poli-
tics. The Labour Members of Parliament protested, but,

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

244

being more loyal than the newspaper-owners, went to
Downing Street and came away under a pledge of silence.
Englishmen went to Angora to tell the Turks that the
people of England would not fight. Politicians saw a
chance to break up the Coalition Government and throw
Mr. Lloyd George into the street.

Bluff demanded quick decisive action and a show of
force. Those who knew the Turks realized that a chal-
lenge would not be taken up, and that a show of force
was the front door to a good peace. Such a show had
to be made alone. Lord Curzon was in Paris striving
for allied unity, but the French had behind them the
treaty made by M. Franklin-Bouillon at Angora. They
wanted safety on the Syrian front. They knew that if
the British fought at Chanak, they must face French
rifles and ammunition, French “ seventy-fives ’’ and
French aeroplanes supplied to the Turks by the French
Government. ^ If further proof of their attitude was
required, it only needed to recall the French ship that
was stopped as it sailed down the Golden Horn in the
first week of January 1922. It was laden with ammuni-
tion and stores for the Turks in Anatolia and its hold-up
by the British caused a diplomatic incident. The French
looked on the success of the Turks as the success of
their prot6g6s, who would listen to them.

On the 25th of September Colonel Shuttleworth, the
commander at Chanak, organized and sent out a strong
mobile column. His sanguine personality and optimistic
courage inspired his whole force. Without nerves he
faced the possibility of a Turkish assault in the placid
knowledge of the value of his troops.

THE GREEK DEFEAT

H5

But the decision lay not with the Home Government
nor with the Chanak commander, but with Lieut.- General
Sir Charles Harington, the Allied Commander-in- Chief.
He kuew nothing of the mentality of the Turks. He
believed that if the Turk was treated as a gentleman he
would behave as one. He did not take the advice of the
experts in the Embassy and those on his staff, who tried
to disabuse his mind of this. He recalled the mobile
column. He sent kindly telegrams of protest to Mustapha
Kemal and received in return brusque replies. He merely
convinced the Turkish command that they held the
whip hand.

The moment for action passed. All who had a
knowledge of the Turks were convinced that if it had
been taken, it would have been the right solution. The
Turkish command would have withdrawn the cavalry
and apologized and been ready to come to terms of
peace. There was a risk. It needed a great soul to
take that risk. The Empire has been built by such
great souls. General Harington ’s telegrams of protest
only revealed our weakness. Bluff became valueless.
Strength slithered down into weak diplomacy unbacked
by force.

The Turks began to realize how matters stood. They
had no desire to fight the British Empire. They decided
on a manoeuvre of peaceful penetration.’’ With arms
reversed and such like tricks they advanced right up to
and in some cases through the British lines. To deal
with such a manoeuvre demanded decision and character,
and these were lacking. It was a great military victory.
By a direct assault costing many thousands of lives the

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

246

Turks might have perhaps attained the same result.
Their manoeuvre was pre-eminently successful, for with-
out loss of men or prestige or material, they made the
British position in Chanak untenable, gained the key to
the situation, and won a decision as effective as the key
battle of a campaign. As a military manoeuvre it should
interest future historians.

In Constantinople I found the source of the trouble,
for there was a sense of insecurity. The Commander-
in-Chief was as it were in the firing-line, and that is
always unsound. The military dispositions were bad.
A great town can only be held by employing the minimum
number of troops as guards and to hold special positions,
and by concentrating the main body in a handy position
and handy formation outside ready for quick action.
/The Allied garrison was scattered in depots and barracks
all over the intricate town and separated by narrow alleys
and areas of wooden houses easily set alight. Officers
lived in private quarters often in back streets and could
not be found at a moment’s notice. There were constant
scares of internal troubles and these at times grew into
panic. The military intelligence was often faulty.

On the Ismidt side the city was exposed, and the
Turks had already begun to advance across the neutral
frontier. The few British troops there were ordered to
stop them but not to open fire.. In such an atmosphere
the commander and his staff made their decisions and
issued their orders.

The Turks, however, were still unsure. They were
afraid of the traditional colossus of Britain. They
hesitated to step into some clever trap laid by British

THE GREEK DEFEAT

247

diplomatists. They knew that Mr. Lloyd George was
prepared to fight. They wished to avoid fighting anyone
but the Greeks, They had little to lose by accepting,
and on the 2nd of October they agreed to a conference
at Mudania.

There for nine days Sir Charles Harington steered
through the shoals of Allied disagreement and Turkish
arrogance. His patience had been treated as weakness
and had increased the obstinacy of the Turks. He now
had orders not to use force without the co-operation
of the other Allies and to the end the Allied quarrels
continued.

By careful diplomacy and unlimited patience Sir
Charles Harington kept the delegates together and per-
suaded Ismet Pasha, the Turkish representative, to sign
the Convention. In the grey light before dawn on the
nth of October the representatives of all Europe stood
waiting restless and tired after hours of strain, eager to
light the first cigarette. Ismet Pasha sat pondering. He
represented a small army of under-fed and under-
equipped troops and a bankrupt State. The Civilized
World waited and held its breath while he pondered
deliberately. Then he signed. The force that decided
his signature was the knowledge that he had gained all
he could hope to gain by bargaining, and that at 5 a.m.
that morning, if he was still obdurate, an ultimatum was
to be presented.

Mudania for the minute saved the situation. It
retrieved at a grievous cost some of the ground lost at
Chanak. As soon as it was decided to avoid the use
of bluff and force it was the only road out of an impasse.

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

248

It suited the politicians in England, for it formed the
last lever with which to throw out Mr. Lloyd George.
To all the enemies of the Coalition, whether politicians
or newspaper-owners, the makers of the Mudania Con-
vention were heroes and to be praised.

But the Turks had been, and were, afraid to fight the
British. Being among them, I saw it each day. They
walked on tip-toe while the negotiations were in pro-
gress. When it was signed they sighed openly with
relief that Turkey was saved from final destruction.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Turkish Success from Mudania to the
Lausanne Conference

T he Mudania Convention was the child of the
Armistice. It was the lack of decision, the
procrastination that hoped to solve dilSculties
by delay, the errors or absence of policy, and the discord
in the Entente, that produced it.

It ended the Armistice. Most of the events that
followed were its direct results. Both sides agreed to
meet and come to terras of peace as soon as possible.
The Allies disowned the Greeks and agreed to eject
them from Eastern Thrace and hand over the country
to the Turks, and to evacuate Turkey themselves as
soon as peace was signed. They promised to make no
further military movement, but left to the Turks liberty
of action outside the neutral zone.

In itself the convention was final and the Lausanne
Treaty, that followed it, was its natural consequence.
The Allies did not use, and then threw away the pawns
in their possession with which they might have bargained.
A large percentage of the Greek troops on the Maritza
front were undefeated. Those who came from Ana-
tolia were organizing. Given permission, vfithin a few

249

250

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

hours, they would have been in Constantinople by the
side of the British. To eject them again would have
been perhaps beyond the power of the Turks ; for
shrewd observers on the spot at that time consistently
reported that the Turkish troops were of little value.
Among the Christian population of the town some
thousands of fighting men could have been enlisted.
These threats were never used at Mudania.

By chasing the Greeks away out of Eastern Thrace
Sir Charles Harington threw away a pawn of maximum
value. He gave up the only weapon that remained and
he made the continuation of the military occupation of
Constantinople by the Allies impossible. With the
Turks in Thrace the land lines of communication were
cut and the city exposed to direct assault at any minute.
It was the second great bloodless victory that the Turks
had won by a little bluff, and by their inherent ability
to sum up the character of their opponent.

Mudania was like the revival of an old play in which
the characters have forgotten the parts they used to
act. The Great War and the Entente were things of
the past. The thinking in terms of the World was gone.
Each nation had settled back into its own individuality
and was looking to its own interests. Suddenly the
Mudania Conference demanded the co-operation of the
Entente. It showed to the enemy that the Entente was
dead, and that all the old fierce rivalries were once more
alive, ready to be used and schemed with. It made it
clear, moreover, that neither together nor individually
would the Allies fight the Turks. It proclaimed the
policy of peace at any price. In the subsequent history

TURKISH SUCCESS

251

the outstanding feature was the presence in the field of
some 100,000 ragged Turkish troops menacing all the
might of Europe.

Though much had been lost at Mudania, the Allies
still held certain assets and might have extricated them-
selves with some show of dignity and honour. But
after Mudania the Allied Military Command was
obsessed with the determination to avoid war at all
costs, and with a belief that the Turks were powerful
and, if opposed, would attack. As a result the enemy
gained the impression that there was a panic. They
intercepted urgent telegrams insistently calling attention
to the dangers of the situation. They saw fantastic
plots unearthed that were crude fabrications. They
knew of schemes for an evacuation to be carried out so
hurriedly that it would resemble a flight.

When the Commander-in- Chief took over from Sir
George Milne he had the whole life of the city and the
neutral area, in every detail, under his control. At
Mudania he agreed to evacuate on the conclusion of
peace. There remained therefore only two lines of
policy, either to hold the city and the area firmly until
the date of evacuation and then let the Turks march
in with flags flying and bands playing and risk the chances
of incendiarism and massacre, or to hand over gradually
and so avoid the shock.

Partly deliberately, partly by force of circumstances, the
second policy was adopted. The Allies had ejected the
Greeks from Eastern Thrace. On the 21st of October
Rafet Pasha, with some gendarmes, was to pass through
Constantinople on his way to take over. He remained

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TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

in. the city. His activities met with no opposition. It
was never realized that all that was needed was a little
firmness which is a stronger weapon than pathetic
weakness cloaked as tact.

Weakness cannot long be hidden. The Turks began
to realize that they had the British at a disadvantage.
They became arrogant and made demands. As they
received all they demanded, they took more. Contrary
to the convention they organized a force in Eastern
Thrace. They pushed in on the Ismidt front. They
had been ready to work in conjunction with the Allies.
Now they demanded the abolition of the military controls
and this was done almost hurriedly. The censorship
of the newspapers and telegrams — ^which formed the
main source of military information — ^was discontinued.
The control of the gendarmerie and police and the
passports was given up. The customs and quays were
handed back.

On one occasion the Turks chased Italian gendarmes
off a ship, while they were doing control work. On
another they refused to recognize British visas and
arrested Armenians employed by the Allies. On yet
another they censored the Commander-in- Chief’s speech,
refused to hand over out of the customs a cup he had
bought as a boxing trophy, and inserted bitter articles
against the Allies in the newspapers. Nationalists were
drilled in the neutral area. Allied troops were molested
and their safety threatened. Against these and similar
offences the only action taken was in the form of gentle
protests. \ When junior officers showed what could be
done with a little determination they were hurriedly

TURKISH SUCCESS

253

ordered to withdraw. The pride of England and her
prestige was humbled, without cause, as it has never
been humbled before.

The Turks were amazed. They treated me as a
friend and with this doubtful privilege I heard many
home truths. Their dislike I could understand and
even appreciate. Now they developed a contempt
which I found hard to bear.

“ Mustapha Kemal,’^ they said, “ and his men were
in the beginning in a far worse position than you are.
Were they afraid ? They have won through.’’

Seeing his chance, Rafet Pasha schemed to bring the
effective occupation to an end. Full details of his plan
were in the hands of the Sultan’s Government and
British head-quarters on the 25th of October. The
following day the Grand Vizier sent for Sami Bey, the
Governor of Skutari. He wished to make him Chief of
Police with full power to clear up the situation and
prevent the carrying out of the plot. The appointment
of Sami Bey was vetoed by the British military
authorities. With its hands so tied, the Sultan’s
Government was powerless.

On the 5th of November Rafet Pasha effected a
bloodless coup d'etat. The Sultan’s Government ceased
to exist. Constantinople became a province under
Angora. The Sultanate was abolished and the Sultan
threatened. At this late hour His Majesty suddenly
showed a stubborn courage. He stood his ground and
refused to abdicate.

It was common knowledge that, following this coup
d'Stat, the High Commissioners, considering that the

^54

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Allied interests were at stake, demanded the proclamation
of a state of siege, and that on the grounds that it would
endanger the safety of the force the military authorities
refused. The British Embassy staff knew the Turk
well. They had no delusions as to his gentlemanly
qualities. They knew that patience and kindness would
be interpreted as fear and so lead to arrogance and
opposition, while strength was the high road to peace.
They showed no panic. They stood firm and courage-
ous, but unable to enforce their views. The military
leaders had become the diplomats,

§

I returned to Skutari to find all my work undone and
the gendarmes dazed. The officers were non-committal.
The men tried gamely to be loyal. In the north the
Nationalists had come in looting and raping. In the
south the Greek villages were empty, and the villagers
had collected their goods and fled for safety. Once
more fear and hatred and murder were the dominant
and ruling forces.

The Turkish villagers were silent, but the townsfolk
had begun to talk crude Bolshevism. Everywhere I
met armed Nationalists. The new nation that had been
bom across the frontier, of hatred and despair, began to
flood into my area. Once more there was the old
danger. The Turks, sheep-like, were being driven by
vigorous leaders, and there was no public opinion to
act as a drag. The wild imdigested fancies of a few
men in Angora were given as orders and carried out
implicitly without understanding.

TURKISH SUCCESS

255

The people neither understood nor S3unpathized. A
night of rejoicing was ordered to follow the success of
the coup d'etat and the end of the old regime. A pale
white moon lit the streets of Skutari. The riff-raff had
been formed into processions. With torches and the
beating of drums they marched round shouting and
singing.

“ For what are you shouting ? ” I called to the leaders
of one procession — a number of porters with whom I
talked often on the shore.

“ Long life for Ghazi Mustapha Kemal ! ” they
cried back.

“ Give a shout for me,” I replied.

“ Certainly,” they said, and gave me many lusty cheers
and then marched away. The police had told them
to rejoice.

For the rest the people were frightened. They
walked softly on tip-toe, not understanding the destruc-
tion of the Sultanate nor their own position. Few went
into the streets and many came to my house to hear
what I had to say. Even the townsfolk reminded me
of the story, as it is told in the Stambul bazaars, of the
men of Turkestan.

Once there came a ship loaded with men of Turkestan.
It lay in anchorage below the Tower of Leander. The
passengers sat placidly on the deck in rows. The
boatmen called to them to come ashore, but they sat
unmoved like images. In despair, one boatman climbed
on board. He caught the nearest passenger by the
long sleeves of his Turkestani coat, tied them together
and dragged the wearer forcibly into his boat. Where-

as6 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

upon all the rest rose gravely in a mass and followed
their brother ; and the boatman with his craft and many
of the men of Turkestan were sunk in the swift Bosphorus
current. So the Turks now played gravely the game of
“ follow my leader.”

With their opponents held down by the Allies, the
Nationalists had carried out a great revolution. Con-
stantinople, the royal city of Byzantium, the imperial
capital of the Osmanli, was now only a subordinate
area in the Angora Government. It was hard to
appreciate the new thing that had happened. I climbed
the hills beyond my house above the palace of Beyler
Bey, where Abdul Hamid, the Red Sultan, had been
imprisoned, and where he had died. It was the Friday
after the coup d’etat. Below me lay the Bosphorus, a
strip of grey sea crowded with battleships at anchor.
There were British battleships that looked like long,
lean, beautiful wild beasts, eager and crouching. There
were dirty, bedraggled French men-of-war with the
day’s washing hung out half-way up to the mast-heads.
There were ugly Italian craft and gaunt, unwieldy
American destroyers tied in pairs. All the navies of
the world lay there in force.

Far away in the Mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent
a priest cried, and from every minaret the muezzins
caught the sound and called the call to prayer. In the
palace ragged soldiers were cooking. A British aeroplane
throbbed out of nothing and slid away into space. From
across the Bosphorus came up the live murmur of the
great city and above it stood out the royal palace and
its seraglio surrounded by double walls.

TURKISH SUCCESS 257

It was the hour for the Selamlik, when the Sultan
and the EJialif, as his ancestors had before him through-
out the centuries, went to public prayer and showed
himself as the Defender of the Faithful and the Monarch
of the World. To-day, there was to be no Selamlik
for there was ^o Sultan and the Edialif had been deposed.
Below lay the navies of the world, and behind them
the great nations searching for order and peace out
of the chaos left by war. In the palace sat the last of
a great race and the ruler of a broken empire. Behind
me, across Anatolia, born in the agony of death, striving
to put away from it the corruption of its fathers, was a
new nation. It was ragged and unkempt. Its future
was doubtful. It had hurled back the Greeks, who had
come as the agents of Europe and as Christian crusaders.
It had forced Europe to its knees. It had tom up its
own empire and ripped away its own traditions. It was
led by men full of ideas so new as to be primitive, who
hurried the complacent people into the steep paths of
experiments that had taken Europe a thousand years
to try.

Far away beyond the palace in a pearl haze lay the
Balkans full of new nations that hated the Turks. The
head of the Bosphorus was hidden by a bank of fog,
dark, lowering and black in the morning light. Wisps
of fog tore out and came down the Bosphorus. Behind
the fog lay Russia, impotent for the minute, but at heart
as insatiable as ever. Behind that fog and the pearl
haze of the Balkans lay the future.

The Lausanne Conference had started and events had
played once more for the Turks. On the 20th of October

s

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

258

with a whoop of joy the politicians had broken up the
Coalition Government and ejected Mr. Lloyd George.
Lord Curzon alone had weathered the storm, but he
had little reason to be proud of this. Far back in 1919
he had informed the Italian Ambassador that he had
had no hand in the sending of the Greeks to Smyrna and
looked on it as a cardinal error. In September 1922
he denied all knowledge of the Cabinet’s^ appeal to the
Empire to stand up to the Turks at Chanak. Between
those dates he was continuously Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs. He allowed the Foreign Office, with
its wealth of knowledge and precedent, to be short-
circuited. He saw the Empire committed to policies
that he knew were wrong and that involved the security
of the world and of future generations. Mr. Lloyd
George may have been ignorant, but Lord Curzon was
aware of the errors. Pregnant with his own pomposity
and the idea of his own ability and of his ovm stupendous
indispensability, he remained in office, and yet influenced
the situation but little. Then when Mr. Lloyd George
fell, Lord Curzon proclaimed that he had never agreed
with his chief, and that now he would put right what
he had always known to be wrong. Mr. Bonar Law
had become Prime Minister. He was preaching “ Tran-
quillity,” and that the health of the world depended on
keeping the patient quiet, and not on vigorous exercise
or operations.

The Sultan Wahad-ed-Din had left Turkey on a
British battleship, and Abdul Medjed had been created
an emasculated edition of a IChalif. The opposition in
Turkey had ceased to exist and Angora was supreme.

TURKISH SUCCESS

^59

§

I saw that the end was near. By December 1922
the Turks were once more in complete control. The
occupation had come to an end. The Allied troops had
become no more than unwelcome guests and even, as
their enemies said, hostages.

All my soul revolted against the crawling to this Pasha
and to that Pasha. The Turks were back thinking in
the arrogant days of Suleiman the Magnificent. When
down and under, they are courteous and charming,
though somewhat fatuous, old gentlemen ; but when up
they are evil devils out of hell. My pride hated to see
the British Empire, without cause, dragged gratuitously
in the mud, while all Asia watched.

These sentiments were shared by the regimental
officers and the soldiers, by the sailors and airmen, and
the Embassy staff. Throughout they had stood self-
restrained, courageous and unmoved, and they made
no pretence that they enjoyed eating mud. In Con-
stantinople are many British who are British because
they have passports. They have not been ^ven pass-
ports because they are British ; but even these combined
with the Allied civilians in condemning the line of policy
adopted by the military command. Never in all this
world has the stupendous power of weakness been so
dramatically illustrated.

Too late the French and Italians realized their errors
Now they began to complain.

You must always,” said the Italian Military Attach^
to me, “keep the red-hot poker close to the nose of the
Turkish beast.” He had forgotten the arms that Italy

26 o

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

had shipped to Adana and Konia for the Turks and the
Italian retirement from Chanak.

For me the position had grown impossible. Though
the Turks treated me well, the area was full of armed
Nationalists who did not know me. I took a last journey
round my land. I saw the Black Sea once more in the
winter’s wind. I rode through Alemdar forest dripping
in a light fog under a pale sun, where stray autumn
leaves sailed down and fell with a fairy crash in the silent
woods. I saw the empty dishevelled villages in the
open plain. I climbed once more the mountain of
Keish Dagh and down the broken road with Hadji
Ramazan behind me. The road was full of holes and
I had planned to mend it in the next spring.

We topped the last rise. With despair in my heart
I looked back to where the white road twisted away into
the horizon and the first trees of Alemdar showed black
against the sky-line. Murder and desolation lay across
all this land once more. I had said good-bye to my
people and they might miss me. To avoid useless regret
I turned quickly this page of life and climbed down into
Europe and the well-known streets of the foreign city.

CHAPTER XXIX

The Lausanne Conference and the Recog-
nition of Turkey

T he Turks were now in full control of all the
neutral area. I found the new nation like
a child that is not sure of its feet, endeavouring
to walk alone and grasping suddenly at new ideas. The
ordinary routine of life was full of new facts and new
theories.

The Lausanne Conference had begun on the 20th of
November 1922, in circumstances that presented little
hope of success.

The Turks had gone to Lausanne truculent in the
knowledge of their new-found strength. As the weakness
of the Allied Command in Constantinople and the
arguments of their opponents showed to them that
they held the whip-hand, they grew more obstinate.
They mistrusted the Allies. The exploitation of the
Ottoman Empire, the Capitulations, the financial controls,
the shameless annexation of sections of their land, the
Treaty of Sevres and the Tripartite Agreement had
handed down to them an heritage of mistrust.

They hated the Allies. The maladministration, the
assistance given to their Christian subjects, the inter-

261

262

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

ference in their private quarrels during the Allied
occupation had fflled them with hatred. All the
brutalities, the raping of women and the devastations,
committed by the Greek troops, were scored up against
the British.

Finally, they went to Lausanne filled with a profound
contempt for the Allies. They realized now that the
Allied Delegates had no force behind them. They
understood the meaning of the lack of firm grip shown
in Constantinople. They began to wonder why they
had been bluffed into signing at Mudania and to boast
that they might, with ease, have marched on to Athens,
and even Vienna.

They sat down at the Conference table haughty and
conscious that their strength was not based on some
diplomatic move, but on an army. But they sat down
cautiously and with suspicion. They feared the guile
of the British diplomats. They were always looking for
catches and snares. They distrusted the craftiness and
skill of their opponents.

Facing them across the Conference table was the
British delegation. It dominated the Entente. It stood
alone as it had at Chanak. Some days before the
Conference Lord Curzon had met M. Poincard and Signor
Mussolini, and they had agreed on some common action.
As soon as the Conference began, the French promises
proved to be valueless. In the French delegation were
M. Barr^re, who stood by the Entente, and M. Bompard,
who stood for French interests alone and cared not at
all for the general good. On the 23rd of January 1923
M. Barr^re retired for reasons of health, and henceforth

THE LAUSANNE CONFERENCE 263

France looked to her own individual interests exclusively.
She was intent on protecting Syria. She was determined
to keep as much of her privileged position in Turkey as
possible. She wanted die money that she had invested
in the Ottoman Empire. She was depressed to find that
her protdges, when successful, treated her with scant
courtesy. Throughout the Conference she followed
her own line. It led her one day on to the side of the
Turks and the next on to the side of the Allies. She
effectually ruined her own interests and earned the
dislike of both sides.

The British delegation was prepared to agree to
liberal terms, but it announced that it came as one of
the victors of the Great War to impose peace. The
Turks maintained that by defeating the Greeks they were
the victors. The outstanding fact remained that the
Turks had force and were prepared to use it, while
the Allied representatives were impotent. The British
refused to strip the situation to its bare realities and deal
with it accordingly.

The British delegation was remarkable for the hostility
of many of its members to the Turks as a whole or to
the Nationalists. The military member was known for
his open championing of the Greeks at the Paris Confer-
ence and later. The experts from the Constantinople
Embassy had stood by the late Sultan and encouraged
him to resist the Nationalists. Civil war rouses fierce
hatred, but the hatred against the foreigner who backs
one side in such a struggle is fiercer still. The President
of the delegation, Lord Curzon, was known to the Turks
as the henchman of Mr. Lloyd George. That he dis-

264 TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

claimed responsibility for the policy of his late leader
was to them only a move in the political game. They
looked on him as the man who had agreed to their
dismemberment during the war, who had tried to destroy
Turkey by the Treaty of Sevres, and who had endeavoured
by the scandalous Tripartite Agreement to divide Anatolia
up among the Allies. Now, having failed, he came
hurrying, holding out across the Conference table the
olive branch of peace and the hand of friendship. Such
a delegation might have made a good peace with Greece
or forced a good peace on a defeated Turkey. But
with the victorious, overweening and suspicious Turk
it could not hope to make any peace but one of
humiliation.

To follow the intricate and dreary negotiations of the
Conference would be a weariness of the flesh. All the
variegated texture of the thousands of international
agreements that had made the pattern of the old Ottoman
Empire was laboriously unravelled and each Power tried
to save what it could. The Turlts knew exactly what
they wanted. They were determined to be free. They
refused to allow the reimposition of any control, and
with all the pawns in their hands they stood firm.

Automatically Lord Curzon became the “ Prince of
Carpet-Buyers.” He refused each Turkish demand.
He bargained through long weary weeks, losing nearly
all, gaining sometimes a little, to find that within the
next few days the Turks had decided not to give way
there also. Any assets he might have had, with which
to bargain, were thrown away by the flabbiness of the
Allied Command in Constantinople. Finally he played

THE LAUSANNE CONFERENCE 365

the last move of the vendor tourist and in anger left
the Conference shop. He waited in Lausanne station
hoping that Ismet Pasha, the merchant, would follow
and accept. But Ismet Pasha did not come, and Lord
Curzon left Lausanne in failure. He had overlooked
the fact that the “ Merchant ” knew, as all the world
did, that he had nothing with which to buy carpets. As
Colonel the Hon. Aubrey Herbert once said in the
House of Commons : “ Lord Curzon treated the Turks
as he often treats us — like naughty schoolboys — and we
neither of us like it.”

The second conference opened a few days later, and
the regular diplomatists and experts set to work to push
the peace through to its logical conclusion. By May
they were little farther. Of liie political clauses fourteen
out of twenty-eight had been reopened. Of the
financial clauses twenty-three out of twenty-five had to
be revised. Forty-five of the clauses of the economic
convention were in the air. Of the hundred and sixty
articles of the treaty ninety-two were still undecided.
The conventions attached were in a similar state.

At sixes and sevens among themselves the Allies gave
back step by step to the Turkish demands. Hopes of
American financial aid at times incited the Turks to new
obstinacy, just when some vital point had been won.
Here and there influential Americans tried to involve
their unwilling Government in commitments in Turkey.
The active hostility of Admiral Bristol, the American
High Commissioner, who appeared to think that his
country’s interests were suffering, did not assist in the
clearing up of the intricate and delicate situation.

266

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Through all the summer of 1923 the delegates haggled
and quarrelled until in late July the Turks had obtained
ninety per cent, of their demands, and with a sigh of
relief the peace was signed and the delegates hurried
away. In the face of all Asia watching, Europe had been
humbled by Turkish evasion, obstruction and defiance ;
and all across the world enemies made a note of these
things.

One incident occurred that showed to what a state
the might of Europe had sunk. Early in the summer
M. Venizelos had been called to look to Greek interests.
He realized the deadlock in the Conference and proposed
to make a separate and good treaty with the Turks and
to demobilize at once. The Allies sternly forbade this
and, while France haggled for her money and England
held fast for barren Mosul, Greece had to wait fully
armed and bankrupt. She was the only force at the
disposal of the Allies. However much they might have
disagreed with Mr, Lloyd George, all the Allies were
once more utilizing the Greeks for their own ends.

The bargaining was at an end. On the 24th of July
1923 the peace was signed. From the point of view
of the victors of the Great War it was a humiliating
peace, but it marked an epoch in history. The Turks
had forced the Allies, against their wishes, to recognize
facts. It legalized much that already existed. It
contained few great ideals or sentimental clauses.

It proclaimed the death of the Ottoman Empire and
the new divisions into which that monstrous and
cumbrous body had already adjusted itself. The vast
Arab lands went their own way. Turkish rights in

THE LAUSANNE CONFERENCE 267

Cyprus, Libya, Morocco, Tripoli, Tunis, Egypt, and a
mass of other places were finally dealt with.

Out of the vast muddle of the old Empire one by one
all the nations of the Near East had struggled free and
taken up their own individual existence. The last to
struggle free and demand recognition was the Turk.

Lausanne recognized the New Turkey, a sovereign
independent state with its destinies in its ovm hands.
From the Maritza river, with an enclave to cover
Adrianople, across Eastern Thrace to Constantinople
and then the whole of Anatolia was to be the extent of
Turkey.

The Turks had forced their recognition, at the point
of the bayonet, on the unwilling Allies. The controls,
the capitulations, the financial restrictions and the special
rights of various nations were destroyed.

The treaty was no artificial or theoretical document.
It legalized and stabilized already existing facts. As
such it had firm foundations. The Great Powers had
buttressed up, and had wish to buttress up again, the
rotten Ottoman Empire. Now it was gone, and the
world was free of its complications that for a century
had weighed as heavily on it as an incubus.

In its place were groups of new nations, each untried,
inexperienced and facing new problems. Some had
been created artificially with European assistance.
Among them all the Turks alone had decided on and
fought out their own destiny. In the face of fearsome
odds they had cast away the corruption of their fathers
and forced their recognition on an unvdlling world.

CHAPTER XXX

New Turkey, 1923

N ew Turkey did not wait for recognition or the
end of the Conference, but forthwith set to
work to reorganize its life. Events hurried
one upon another into existence and were registered at
Lausanne and legalized as facts. Constantinople had
become of minor importance. The Allied army of
occupation, except as an irritant, had ceased to affect
the situation. It remained on sufferance and in humilia-
tion until its evacuation on the znd of October 1923.
But from its point of vantage it was possible to watch
the first efforts of the young state.

The gendarmerie commission was at an end. The
Allied occupation was a dead thing, and in the new
year I was due to leave.

The country to which I had come in 1916 bore little
resemblance to that which I left in 1923. The stupen-
dous upheaval of war and revolution had swept away
every landmark. It had torn up beliefs and axioms
ages old. It had released new forces which as yet gave
no indication as to what they would produce. All old
fixed conceptions had to be readjusted.

The vast Ottoman Empire was gone, and in its place

268

NEW TURKEY, 1923 269

many small nations, like half-blind puppies weaned too
early from their mother, struggled for life.

The social system of the Turks had collapsed. For
economic and other reasons veiled women and harpims
had disappeared. Freely and unashamed the women
had come out into the open. In their power for good
and evil lay the future life of Turkey.

The Christian minorities had ceased to exist. Those
Christians who had remained in Turkey were to be
transported. The rest were in exile or dead. With
their acceptance of the ejection of the Greek Patriarch,
Meletios IV, the Allies crowned their betrayal of the
Ottoman Christians whom they had used and misled.
The English bishops and the Federal Council of the
Christian Churches of America, representing some
20,000,000 Americans, protested loudly, but left the
matter in the hands of God. In this they might have
learnt a lesson from Mohammed himself who taught
action as well as placid faith. One day he travelled on
horseback with a friend and at midday they slept under
some trees. When they woke, the friend discovered
that his horse was gone.

“ But,” he said plaintively, “ I had placed him in
the hands of God.”

“ So did I,” replied Mohammed, “ but before I slept,
I tied him up securely.”

While the religious communities of England and
America cried shame, they did nothing ; and the Turks
cleared their land of undesirables.

The future of new Turkey was problematic. In
ejecting the Christians, to obtain national solidarity, the

270

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

Turks had driven away their artisan, shopkeeper, and
working classes and many of their minor officials. They
themselves had shown little ability at the routine of civil
life and governmental work which are the driving forces
of a state. Among them were serious dissensions that
at times flared into violence. They retained the poten-
tially rich land of Anatolia, but with a slender population
that appeared to have been smitten with sterility. Im-
potent for the minute but watching them closely were
many enemies, and near at hand was Russia, the colossus
of the future that would demand a gateway by the
Dardanelles into the outer-world. Italy had kept the
island of Castellorizo and her ambitions in South Anato-
lia. Servia aspired to greatness. All the external safe-
guards of Turkey were gone. The old game of playing
nation against nation was finished. The country was
bankrupt, and capital was afraid to come without
capitulations.

Triumphant amid a mass of ruins Turkey stood, for
the first time in all its history, a homogeneous nation.
Born at the occupation at Smyrna, it had been bred in
the hard school of war. Now it stood quite alone.
Whether it could become fat, compact and efficient,
capable of regulating its own internal life and resisting
outside pressure and attack, was a problem that lay
hidden in a misty future.

I searched diligently among the Turks for the principles
on which they were organizing. Despair and a war of
self-preservation had given them a strange new virility
and new ambitions. But they seemed to be driven
more by the sudden kick of hatred than the smooth-

NEW TURKEY, 1923 271

running energy of new life. From the West they had
borrowed the idea of Nationality as based on a community
of blood, religion, language and interest. They had
chosen from other nations various definite methods of
government such as the secularization of all departments,
the separation of religion and state, cabinet responsibility,
parliament and general suffrage. But they had borrowed
nothing from the West in ideas. They took only the
practical results and refused the inspiration, the ideals
and the guidance of Europe. Whereas in the revolution
of 1908 they turned to the West for salvation, now they
turned Eastwards and proudly proclaimed themselves to
be of the East.

The Turks had shown themselves to be materialists,
but behind them all across the East was a great Moslem
revival. Europe had based its hopes on material effi-
ciency. Now the East appealed to the things of the
spirit. It was a revival for war and power and to show
that Islam is superior to all other systems and that
the Moslems are superior to all other men. It had
within it the pent-up resentment of the East against
the domineering superiority of the West,

In this Turkey had been involved. She had headed
the revolt of the East. She had hurled back Europe.
She had been proclaimed the champion ; but at heart
she had little interest in these things. Turkey was, as
she had been before, a select oligarchy of capable men
who now used the pliant phrases of democracy to cloak
their power, and who ruled a dull obedient people.

I pondered on these things by Galata Bridge. The
city lay all round me asleep and full of black shadows

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

272

and clear white light. Pera and Galata were grey and
formless. Stambul faced me, and up over Stambul,
against the sky, towered the great monstrous domes of
the mosques threatening and heavy beside their delicate
minarets. I wondered whether that great spiritual
revival would swamp Turkey and advance beyond it
into Europe.

Suddenly I realized that throughout all these years,
passive, trying to help a little, but detached, untouched,
not vitally affected, I had watched events from without.
I had seen let loose the soul-tearing passions of war,
patriotism, fanaticism and hatred. Round me were new
nations born of strivings and agony, full of unknown
forces, pushing on into the blind future like rough and
unshapely primitive animals clawing and groping brutally
in the twilight of the jungle in a primeval world. I
had seen men when roused by the great forces of the
spirit go to death merry and glad, or fiercely to do foul
bestialities. I had seen great Empires tom into rough
bits which lay with all their edges raw and aching. I
had seen great men, in the detachment of power, shrug
shoulders, make a caustic jest and laugh at some stupen-
dous error and then hasten away to a rich dinner, while
all across the world came the sighs of millions starving.

Detached and aloof I felt as one who has found an
ants’ nest, broken by some clumsy unheeding foot, and
who passes a summer’s afternoon watching with lazy
interest all the panic and the bravery, the hurryings,
and the mass strivings of the seething pigmy world
beneath him.

I knew that God too must be detached. I searched

NEW TURKEY, 1923 273

among all the strivings and the gropings for some hope
of the futures that were to come of all these agonies.
If God too watched a broken world with lazy interest,
then the stupendous, but saving, jest of the Universe
died in despair and blasphemy.

§

For me the end had come. The gendarmerie control
was over. The Turks were in full possession and wanted
no help. The Allied Army of Occupation, now impotent,
was waiting impatiently the hour of embarkation. Before
dawn on the last day I was up and away to catch the
early train, and I waited while Galata Bridge was being
closed. I wondered on Turkey and whether her future
rested with the Turks. It seemed but just to put away
prejudice and hatred and watch even with sympathy
the efforts of the new state.

In 1916 I had come, improtected, in the hour of
defeat, to Turkey. I had seen the destruction of the
enemy and the rise of the British Empire to the heights
of a stupendous victory. Unprotected I crept away
now in the hour of defeat and disillusionment.

Beyond St. Stephano I looked back. The Marmora
was full of little waves in the morning breeze. Skutari
and my area lay in haze. Santa Sophia squatted beside
the Old Seraglio. The Mosque of Suleiman the Magni-
ficent towered close by the War Office and the Watch
Tower. Over all lay a mist, white in a clear dawn,
that made a pearl-coloured shroud to this city of many
dreams. Across the view the rugged old walls of ancient
Byzantium stood boldly out.

T

TURKEY IN TRAVAIL

274

For a while I had seen greatness. For a short while
I had walked with the British Empire in the valley of
the shadow of death.

I had watched a New Nation burst its way out, as
in a volcanic eruption, through the ashes and ruins of
the Ottoman Empire, hurl aside its enemies who clung
clogging round it as restraining as cold lava, and then
in a flame of white enthusiasm set out to seek its own
destiny. Whether it carried merely destruction, or might
fashion itself into something clean and good, I could
not see.

The train drew out. I left behind me all this new
life struggling in the chaos of creation. I left behind
me much that had made good dreaming ; and so came
once more to Europe and to face other adventures.

INDEX

Abdullah the Chaoush, 199
Abdul Medjed as Khalif, 258
Adrianople, 116, 125, 241
Afion-Kara-Hissar, 32, 14S, 208,
239

Aharonian, M., 222
Ahmed Auzavour, 89, 115
Aidin, 94, 125
Alashehir, 125
Alemdar, 166, 168
Aleppo, 27

Alexander, King, 138
All Fethi Bey's Mission, 239
Ali Fuad Pasha, 119, 121
Ali Khan, ii
Allied Administration, 76
Allied Neutral Frontier, 206
Amanus Mountains, 28
America, 82, 265
Amritzar Riots, 121
Anastas, 161
Anatolia, 21, 120
Anglo-Persian Treaty, 120
Angora, 29, 36, I 4 S» 209
Angora and Constantinople,
Struggle between, 89
Angora Government proclaimed,
142

Anti-Turkish feeling in England,
64

Arabs, to, 13, 14, 18, 22, 121
Archbishop of Canterbury, 104
Armenia, 85, 116, 222

Armenian massacres, 26, 28, 109
Armenian of Samandra, The,
217

Armenians, 224
Arms depots, 142, 143
Athens, 68

Aubrey Herbert, Colonel the
Hon., 265
Austria-Hungary, v
Avarqff, The battleship, 151
Azerbaijan, 116

Bagdad, 3, 4, 17, 18, 19, 22
Bagdad Railway, 19
Bakal Keuy, 160, 168
Balkans, 234
Barrfere, M., 262
Basra, 4

Batum, Evacuation of, 120
Beatty, Admiral, 243
Beicos, 186
Beicos, Raid on, 122
Bela Kun, 235
Beshik Tash, 150
Bigha, 147

Black Sea, 29, 32, 260
Blanche the Dancer, 180, 182
Boghos Nubar Pasha, 222
Bolsheviks, 91, 141
Bolshevism, 129
Bompard, M., 262
Bonar Law, Mr., 258
275

INDEX

276

Bosphorus, 241
Bozanti, 29, 119
Bristol, Admiral, 265
British Delegation at Lausanne,
263

British policy, 77
British retire from Anatolia, 88
Brusa, 125
Buda-Pest, 234, 235
Bulgaria, 59

Burial of the Unknown Warrior,

133

Cabinet secretariat, 132
Canelopoulos, 94
Caucasus Soviet Republics, 21 1
Cerularius Patriarch, 103
Chakal Dagh, 166
Chamlidje, 159
Chanak, 145, 146, 241
Chanak crisis. The, 242
Cherkes Keuy, Skirmish at, 90
Christian Minorities, 218, 269
Christians, 34, 150, 152, 174, 215,
218, 224, 225

Christians in Turkey, 105, 218
Christo, 172
Cilicia, 21, 6$

Circassians, 115
Clemenceau, M., 137
Conference in London, 145
Constanides, the Muktar, 187
Constantine, King, 138, 145, 207
Constantinople, 66, 71, 79, 96,
97

Constantinople Government, 88
Constantinople no more the
capital, 256

Constantinople, Occupation of,
110

Constantinople under Allied
Control, 105, 106

Corfu, 67
Coup d^Etat, 253
Crimea, 141
Crimean cemetery, 39
Crusades, 103

Curzon, Lord, 120, 121, 132, 239,
244, 258, 262, 263, 264, 26s

Damad Ferid Pasha, 88, 89, 104,
los, 113, 114, 115, ii8, 126,
128, 239

Dardanelles, 71, 241
Demitri, 228

Democracy among Turks, 33
Denikin, 91, 116
Deportees to Malta, in, 112,
213

Derindje, 122
Deserters, 27
Disarmament, 85

East and West, 79, 271
Eastern Thrace, Evacuation of,
250

Egypt, 60

Embassy, Constantinople, 75, 76,
78

Emir Feisal, $8
Entente, The, 94
Enver Pasha, 41, 44, 48
Eski Shehir, 29, 115, 126, 145,
208

France and Turkey, 92, 262
Franchet dTsp^rey, General, 77
Franco-British friction, 65, 91,
92, 93, 262, 263

Franklin-Bouillon, 93 210, 244
French in Syria, 108

INDEX

277

Galata, 73
Galata Bridge, 50
Gallipoli, vi
Garroni, Marquis, zi2
German colonists, 214
Germans, v, 15, 16, 19, 29, 37,
40, 47, 48, 50, SI, 52, 58, 59, 6i,
78, 116, 214
Golden Horn, 43, 50
Grand National Assembly, 115
Great Four, The, 96
Greater Greece, 137, 138
Greco-Turkish War declared,
146

Greece, 82

Greek atrocities, 209, 215
Greek crusade, vii
Greek devastations, 145, 146,
215

Greek line, July 1920, 126
Greek offensive of Summer
1921, 207
Greek position, 94
Greek prisons, 68, 69
Greek threat to Constan-
tinople, 239
Greek troops, 233
Greeks, 138, 141, 249
Grey, Lord, 120

Hadjienestis, 2ii
Hadji Ramazan, 163, 165, 172,
184, 190, 260

Haidar Pasha, 39, 51, 214
Haidar Pasha, The explosion at,
2x4

Halide Edeb Hanum, 86
Hamdi Pasha, 1x4
Hammam Ali, 24
Harems, 99

Harington, Sir Charles, X40, 149,
24X, 245> 247

Hassan the Chaoush, 226, 227
High Commissioner, British, 77,

X27

History of Turkey, X96
Hohler, Sir Thomas, 235
Home Government, 127
Horthy, Admiral, 236
Hospitals, Turkish, 38
Husein Husni, x8o, 190, 2x4

Imperialism, 229
Indian Army, 124
Ineboli, 2x3
Intrigue, A city of, 102
Ireland, 116, 121, 135
Islam, 194

Islands of the Princes, 203
Ismet Pasha, 247, 265
Ismidt, 125
Ismidt line, I2X
Ismidt line, Attack on, 122
Italian emigration, 65
Italian policy, 65
Italians, 65, 90, 91, 1 15
Italy, 66, 82
Izzet the Albanian, 199

Jaffir Tahir, 116, 125
Jemal Bey, 44, 47» 50

Karaoglan, 160, xyx
Kars, 116

Keish Dagh, 17X, X74
Khalifate, X36
Khalil Pasha, is
Kiamil the Muktar, 191
Kiazim Kara Bekir, 119
KilkiSf The battleship, 151
Kizikli, XS9
Kurdish porters, 152

INDEX

278

Kurdistan, 21
Kurds, 95 , US,

Kurt Dogmush, 162, 164
Kustamotini, 21, 29, 30
Kutahia, 208

Kut-al-Amarah, vi, 3, 4 > 5 » ^5

Labour, 134
Labour Party, 229
Lausanne Conference, 257, 261,
262

Lausanne Treaty, 249, 266, 267
Leander^s Tower, 72,

Levantines, 78
Levantinia, 79

Lloyd George, Mr., 121, 125,
132, 136, 188, 189, 231, 239,
242, 243, 244, 247, 248, 258

MacDonald, Mr. Ramsay, 129
Mahmud Shevket Pasha, 184,
187

Maps as Propaganda, 63
Marash, Siege of, 108
Maritza River, 240
Marmeris, 148
Marmora, Sea of, 37, 71
Massacres, 223
Materialism, Boom in, 133
Mazlum Bey, 54, 56, 78, 213
Medical Services, 5
Meletios Patriarch, 104
Mesopotamia, vi, 4, 18, 21, 121
Milan, Revolution in, 130
Milne, Sir George, General, 77,
no, 114

Mohamed the Conqueror, 103
Mohammedan tradition in Eng-
land, 136

Montagu, Mr., 136, 137
Moscow, 1 16

Mosque of Omar, 20
Mosul, 25

Mudania Conference, 247
Mussolini, Signor, 262
Mustapha Kemal, 86, 88, 89, 1 13,
116, 119, 142, 232
Mustapha Kemal, his allies, 95

Nachivan, 116
Napoleon, 209
Nationalism, 220
Nationalists, 88
National Pact, The, 90, 108
Neutral Zone, 240
Neutral Zone declared, 146
Nikola, 172
Nineveh, 25

Ninth Caucasus Army, 85
Nisibin, 25
Nonconformists, 137

Odessa, 109
Ottoman Christians, 84
Ottoman Greeks, 146, 207
Ottoman peasantry, Types of,
169, 170

Ottoman rule, 148, 216
Ottoman Turk, 34

Pan-Islam, 136
Paraskevopoulos, 125
Passport control, Allied, 72
Patras, 67
Patras prison, 68
Pavli, 160

Peace Conference in Paris, 8i
Pendik, 213
Pera, 72

Perekop Isthmus, 141
Petits Champs des Morts, 74

INDEX

279

Phanariot rule, zig
Pichon, M., 92
"Idiots, 212
Poincare, M., 262
Polonnez Keuy, 189
Pontus State, 85, 222
Pope and Patriarch, 102, 103
Position in Autumn 1920, 127
Prince Heritier, The, 92
Prince Sami, 231
Prisoners’ privilege, The, 20
Pushti-Ku, The, 7

Rafet Pasha, 251, 253
Rahmet Ali, Subedar, 12
Rahmi Bey, 213
Raouf Bey, 86, 213
Ras-al-Ain, 27
Recruits, Turkish, 40
Riwa River, 189

Robeck, Admiral Sir John de,
105, 128

Robin, Sir Paul, 55
Rue Glavanni, 74
Russia, 82

Russian refugees, 107, 141
Ryan, Mr., the dragoman, 105,
128

Saint Jean de Maurienne, 82
Saint Sophia, 37, 103
Sakkaria River, 208
Salonika, 69, 70
Samarra, 19

Sami Bey, the Governor, 180,
181, 214

Secret agents, 144
Self-determination, 8i, 8a
Servia, 234
Sevastopol, X4X

Sbvres, Treaty of, 117, 120, 128*
140, 142, 149, 177, 210, 224
Shamran, 15
Shaw, Mr. Tom, 129
Sherif Bey, 32, 36
Shuttleworth, Colonel, 114, 244
Sidki the liar, 163, 171, 172,
200

Signor Orlando, 83
Sixth Division, 3, 18
Skutari, 37, 150, 152
Smyrna, 59, 8i, 82, 83, 84, 85,
124, 125, 240
Smyrna and Italy, 65
Snowden, Mrs. Philip, 129
Sofia, 234
Stambul, 37, 43
Stambulinski, 130
Sultan, The, 88, 112, ii3» ii5»
116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122,
153. *31. *33. *S3. *S8
Sultan and Khalif, 257
Sultan’s message, 232, 233
Switzerland, 66
Sykes-Picot agreement, 65, 82

Taranto, 61, 67
Tarsus, 29

Tartars of Nachivan, 95
Tash Delen Spring, 169
Taurus Mountains, 29
Tekreet, 22

Tewfik, son of Osman, 200
Third International, 130
Thrace, 234, 240
Tigris, 3, 4, 6, 23, 24, 25
Trade Slump, 135
Treaty of Angora, 93, 210
Tripartite Agreement, ii8, 264
Turkestan, Tale of the men of,

25s

Turkish devastations, 147

INDEX

Turkish officers, 39, 230
Turkish peasants, 78
Turkish reprisals, 146
Turkish social system, 84, 269
Turkish successful attack, 239
Turkish troops, 23
Turkish women, 98, 99, 100, 193,

194, 195

Turks, The, 178, 192, I94, ^95

Urfa, Siege of, 108
Ushaq, 125

Venizelos, 83, 95* 124, 126, I37»
138, 139, I4S» 2107
Vienna, 236

Wahad-ed-Din, Sultan, 258

War Office, 62, 63, 132
Whittalls, 167

Wilson, Field-Marshal Sir

Henry, 237

Wilson, Lieut.- General Sir

Henry, 77, no
Wilson, President, 117, 133
Wrangel, General, 120, 141
Wrangel, General, liis defeat, 138

Yahoudi Chiffik, 158
Yalova, 117
Yedi-Kule prison, 69

Zaffiri, 160

Zangulduk, Attack on, 120

Zeki Pasha, 114

Zia the Lieutenant, 226